Accents and Demographics

Accents and Race
According to some reports people can identify a persons ethnic group within a society by their accent, e.g. African-American people in America, British-Caribbean people with British accents. Some people have criticized this claim as a form of racism as it makes assumptions based on linguistic stereotypes. Kentucky's highest court in the case of Clifford v. Commonwealth held that a white police officer, who had not seen the black defendant allegedly involved in a drug transaction, could, nevertheless, identify him as a participant by saying that a voice on an audiotape "sounded black." The police officer based this "identification" on the fact that the defendant was the only African American man in the room at the time of the transaction and that an audio-tape-- contained the voice of a man the officer said “sounded black” selling crack cocaine to a white informant planted by the police.[4]