Say a sentence. Any sentence. Now change your accent just a little.Soften a vowel. Drop a consonant. Make it British or Spanish or something in between.Now ask yourself, did that sentence feel smarter or stranger, more trustworthy, more foreign. The truth is, we don't just hear what people say. We hear where they're from. We hear where we think that they belong.Accents are a little bit like passports. They carry assumptions, credibility, class, intelligence, even kindness. And yet, like passports, they can ...