Drawing on Bourdieu's (1977) theoretical framework, our proposed paper strives to characterise the structure of the linguistic habitus of our 250 informants from the specific perspective of their accent-related self-perception and language attitudes. For this purpose, self-report data obtained in a questionnaire form were scrutinised.
The analysed body of our data seems to indicate that the majority of our informants ascribe a clearly positive emotional value to their hitherto experience of one's own accentedness in an authentic communicative context. Furthermore, accented speech does not appear to be a cause for concern in half of the examined sample.
Thus, our results may signal the growing acceptance of non-native teacher identities. Consequently, the elementary premise that we based our preliminary research on and that regards the neutral (native) accents as norm-setting and evaluatively determining might be contested.