A talented product manager moves from Bogotá to Berlin. Her metrics are strong, her team trusts her, yet she keeps hearing small comments: “Could you say that again, more clearly?” “Let’s have James handle the client call—he’s more… fluent.” No one is overtly hostile. Still, over time, the message is unmistakable: your ideas are fine, but your voice isn’t.
We often celebrate global mobility as a path to creativity and growth. But in many workplaces today, a quieter barrier is rising alongside growing hostility toward migrants: linguistic racism. It’s the practice—sometimes conscious, often not—of using language, accent, or perceived “fluency” as a proxy for competence, trustworthiness, or leadership potential. This isn’t just semantics. Linguists and sociolinguists have long shown how language norms map onto power and race, making certain ways of speaking seem “neutral” and others “deficient”—even when everyone is perfectly intelligible.
What linguistic racism looks like
Linguistic racism comes in different disguises. Here are just a few examples:
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Accent as a sorting device. In hiring and promotion, a “native-like” accent is treated as a quality signal—regardless of what the person actually says or delivers. Recent meta-analyses find consistent penalties for non-standard or migrant-associated accents/dialects in interview settings and selection outcomes.
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Monolingual defaults. Policies and norms assume one “correct” way of speaking. Multilingual assets go underused; multilingual people do extra emotional labor to fit a narrow mold.
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Meeting dynamics that punish difference. Fast-turn conversations, interruptions, and little summarizing amplify small differences in rhythm and idiom into big judgments about capability. Experiments also show accented speech can be (wrongly) judged less credible—simply because it’s a fraction harder to process.
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Tech that can’t hear you. Automated interview platforms, call monitoring, and transcription tools struggle more with some racialized varieties of speech; error rates can be dramatically higher, baking bias into evaluation.
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Customer myths. “Our clients prefer a certain accent” becomes an unquestioned assumption that justifies keeping migrants away from revenue roles—despite little hard evidence and clear legal risk where policies drift toward “English-only” by default.
Why this matters for global work
Global companies rely on two things that language touches directly: speed (how quickly knowledge flows) and inclusion (how many brains actually contribute). Linguistic racism slows the first and shrinks the second. It also undermines your brand in diverse markets. If your organization can’t hear an employee’s voice, it’s unlikely to hear a customer’s either.
There’s also a deeper identity cost. Migrants already navigate the tension between fitting in and staying true to themselves. When “sounding right” becomes a condition for opportunity, people start opting out—of meetings, of stretch roles, of the company altogether. The result is lower engagement and higher voluntary turnover among precisely the globally minded talent firms say they want.
So what can leaders do?
How can leaders bring people close enough—linguistically and culturally—to collaborate effectively without erasing the distinctiveness that makes global teams strong? Here are six levers:
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Redesign selection to separate content from accent.
Use structured interviews, scoring guides tied to job-relevant signals, and work-sample tasks. Ban “native speaker” requirements unless a legal or safety need makes them essential—and write down the rationale. -
Set a common language with humane guardrails.
It’s fine to name a working language for coordination. It’s not fine to police casual interactions or forbid other languages in breaks and sidebars. In U.S. contexts, “always English” rules face EEOC scrutiny unless narrowly tailored to business necessity. -
Fix the meeting.
Slow the cadence. Share agendas and materials in advance. Rotate facilitation and note-taking. Summarize decisions in writing. Invite “last-word” contributions by chat or follow-up. These small structures dilute the power of “fluency-as-performance.” -
Audit your tech.
If you use automated transcription, interview AI, or call analytics, test them across accents and dialects common in your workforce and markets. Where performance is uneven, provide human review channels and don’t use those outputs in performance decisions. -
Challenge the client myth.
If someone says, “Our customers won’t accept that accent,” ask for evidence. Pilot diverse frontline teams. Provide coaching on framing and turn-taking—not accent reduction as a condition for access. -
Build the pipeline, not the penalty.
Offer language support as development, not remediation. Fund presentation coaching and cross-cultural communication training for everyone, including so-called native speakers, as they will benefit from clarity habits, too.
There’s a simple test for assessing how you progress: Do people feel heard even when they don’t sound like you? If the answer is no, your diversity advantage is eroding in plain sight. Start small. Rewrite one job ad. Add a two-minute written recap to the next meeting. Ask a vendor for their accent-parity numbers. Move a high-potential colleague with a stigmatized accent into a visible role and support them publicly. These moves won’t make headlines, but they’ll make your organization more capable in a world where talent and ideas cross borders, even when politics tries to build walls.