How many people in the US don’t have an accent?

First, the linguist’s answer: none. Zero. Everyone who uses a language uses a variety of that language, one that reflects their social identity–including things like gender, socioeconomic status or regional background.

But the truth is that some people, especially in the US, have the social privileged of being considered “unaccented”.  I can’t count how many times I’ve been “congratulated” by new acquaintances on having “gotten rid of” my Virginia accent. The thing is, I do have a lot of linguistic features from Tidewater/Piedmont English, like a strong distinction between the vowels in “body” and “baudy”, “y’all” for the second person plural and calling a drive-through liquor store a “brew thru” (shirts with this guy on them were super popular in my high school). But, at the same time, I also don’t have a lot of strongly stigmatized features, like dropping r’s or strong monopthongization you’d hear from a speaker like Virgil Goode (although most folks don’t really sound like that anymore). Plus, I’m young, white, (currently) urban and really highly educated. That, plus the fact that most people don’t pick up on the Southern features I do have, means that I have the privilege of being perceived as accent-less.

Map showing the distribution of speakers in the United States who use “y’all”.

But how many people in the US are in the same boat as I am? This is a difficult question, especially given that there is no wide consensus about what “standard”, or “unaccented”, American English is. There is, however, a lot of discussion about what it’s not. In particular, educated speakers from the Midwest and West are generally considered to be standard speakers by non-linguists. Non-linguists also generally don’t consider speakers of African American English and Chicano English to be “standard” speakers (even though both of these are robust, internally consistent language varieties with long histories used by native English speakers).  Fortunately for me, the United States census asks census-takers about their language background, race and ethnicity, educational attainment and geographic location, so I could use census data to roughly estimate how many speakers of “standard” English there are in the United States. I chose to use the 2011 census, as detailed data on language use has been released for that year on a state-by-state basis (you can see a summary here).

From this data, I calculated how many individuals were living in states assigned by the U.S. Census Bureau to either the West or Midwest and how many residents surveyed in these states reported speaking English ‘very well’ or better. Then, assuming that residents of these states had educational attainment rates representative of national averages, I estimated how many college educated (with a bachelor’s degree or above) non-Black and non-Hispanic speakers lived in these areas.

So just how many speakers fit into this “standard” mold? Fewer than you might expect! You can see the breakdown below: