MINI REVIEW article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Health Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1676277
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Role of Othering in Health Communication and Its Implications for EquityView all 3 articles
Accent Bias and Equity: Implications for Healthcare
Provisionally accepted- University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
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Healthcare delivery, particularly as it is provided through telephone triage presents unique challenges for research since it sits at the intersection of different disciplines with different research traditions and represents a safety critical domain. Sociolinguistics provides health communication valuable insights, highlighting how language attitudes and biases, particularly towards non-standard or accented speech, affect judgments on credibility, intelligence, and likability. This is critical in medical contexts where e.g. pain is self-reported verbally and underlying biases may influence care decisions. Unlike in-person consultations, telephone triage lacks visual and physical examination cues, relying heavily on acoustic information, which may amplify language-based biases. Researching language bias in healthcare is challenging, but sociolinguistic methods offer neutral research pathways to improve delivery. This mini-review explores the influence of language biases on health communication and patient care, outlines methodological approaches, and suggests interventions for addressing unconscious biases, with implications extending to healthcare equity and linguistic competence in medical education.
Keywords: Health Communication, sociolinguistics, language attitudes, accent bias, Telephone triage, Healthcare equity
Received: 30 Jul 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Roth. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Evelyn Nikola Roth, evelyn.roth@plus.ac.at
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