Everybody has an accent, even if they don’t realize it. We all talk differently, and no two people sound exactly the same. 
But do we deserve to be made fun of for our accents?
That’s exactly what Gawker, a popular media blog, is doing with their atrocious America’s Ugliest Accent Tournament. With 16 American cities from Tallahassee to Baltimore to New Orleans, this tournament lets readers choose which accent is truly the ugliest. 
Gawker uses handy YouTube videos to display the best example of a city’s regional dialect. For Chicago, there’s a candid video of a woman taking an order at a warehouse supermarket. Another video shows a city counselor in Massachusetts who speaks with a blatant Boston accent. 
This tournament is a great example of one thing: linguistic discrimination. 
Although society has already deemed which accents are “bad” and which are “good,” Gawker is going so far as to say these accents are unattractive and mock those who have them. 
The tournament not only makes fun of the millions of Americans with distinct regional accents — it makes light of the very real problem of linguistic discrimination.
An example of linguistic discrimination’s negative impact is showcased in Anita Henderson’s 2001 study, where she found that “those who sound black are rated as less intelligent and ambitious and less favorably in job level” after playing tapes of potential job applicants for hiring managers in Philadelphia. 
Language is always evolving. Written language and spoken language have extreme differences, especially with the advent of instant messaging and texting. Language is always adapting to trends and current situations, which is why we have words like “selfie” and added a second definition of “literally” to dictionaries. 
All of this is a way of saying there is no “wrong way” to speak English. A Baltimore dialect, a thick Yat accent, and the General American accent all newscasters are forced to adopt are just as valid as one another. When you commit linguistic discrimination by suggesting there’s wrong way to speak English, it’s not so much about the language as it is about the people speaking it. 
For example, we have much more negative connotations with the so-called “Valley Girl” accent because it is spoken by young women. There’s no widespread mocking of men with California accents. The same goes for those who speak African-American Vernacular English — it’s more about the race of the speaker than the dialect. 
Gawker’s Ugliest Accent Tournament is purposefully offensive, as if it’s somehow cool and edgy to be a bigot. They even go on to say that if your own accent is chosen as the “ugliest,” they’ll “burn your ugly trash accent onto a CD-R after we buy a CD burner then dig a hole somewhere in New York and bury it.”  
Although they do preface with “No matter who you are, you all sound disgusting,” the entire purpose of the tournament is to find who sounds the most disgusting. So much for a disclaimer.
It shouldn’t matter whether you fully pronounce the “-ing” at the end of all of your verbs for you to get a job, and it shouldn’t be a reason to be crowned with the glorious title of America’s Ugliest Accent. 
SidneyRose Reynen is a 19-year-old film and media arts and art history sophomore from New Orleans. You can follow her on Twitter @sidneyrose_TDR.