[melipone]

IMHO, it's not which accents are strong enough. It's the baggage that an accent brings. Yes, people pattern match an accent but not just the words. For example, the content of what a woman with a strong French accent says will be diluted with thoughts of sexiness instead of being taken seriously (except Christine Lagarde :-)). In this sense, the validity of PG's claim is not cut and dry. There are other factors.

[AYBABTME]

I don't think so. Diluting a speakers content into cultural bias implies that the content of the speech is understood to begin with. This is not the case for what I'd call a strong accent. Those strong accent are too far away from a locution I can make sense of. A strong accent makes it hard to grasp the words that are said. And if you're in a venture perspective and nobody can make sense of the words that are getting out of your mouth, I believe it's fair to say that your strong accent is a problem.

From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.

English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.

My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.

[btilly]

In environments outside of tech hubs like the Silicon Valley bubble, I would strongly agree. For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.

[commandar]

>For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In fairness, speaking as someone from Georgia, you run into a lot of this within the south. I've lived here my entire life, and generally speak with a fairly neutral, midwestern accent, and I'd say that it's extremely common within the roughly 35 and under demographic around here.

Not commenting on whether it's fair or not, but because there is such a stigma around southern accent = stupid, many southerners, especially younger ones, make a concerted effort not to pick up the accent. Generally, the younger and better educated a southerner is, the less likely they are to sound like a southerner. That's not because the accent makes someone stupid, but because there is an awareness that it has that perception, so people avoid it.

And, I mean, I'll still fall into it in less formal settings or when I'm cranking up the charm, but in a business environment it gets switched off.

[prostoalex]

It's not bigotry, but lack of investment in conversational English is frequently accompanied with lack of investment in vocabulary and idiomatic English expressions.

If you work at a large Silicon Valley company, there's always that one meeting where someone at the table, while obviously smart, speaks such an incomprehensible version of English, that whenever suggestions from their end are vocalized, everyone looks at one another with silent "did you get that?", nods politely and then moves on.