"My point is not that we need to forget the aim of easily comprehensible communication — obviously, that remains the goal. But we do need to set aside the illusion that there is a single true and authentic way to speak."

Here, I agree with him entirely. The remark, "He has an accent" has always baffled me, because it's meaningless to remark upon something everyone has or does. It's like saying "He breathes." Yes, and...? I always feel like saying, "So do you. So do all of us." It's the same thing with "culture." I hated it when well-meaning liberals told me I was so "cultural" (???) based solely on my background, as if their belonging to the dominant group erased their culture heritage.

(continued)

Yes, everyone has an accent. Linguistic discrimination exists everywhere, especially in the language learning world.

Depending on the language, the discrimination is "officialized" and much more spread, such as German, for instance. And I am talking about discrimination between native speakers.

It's very common to find German speaking people with the discriminative speech of "Germans from Hannover speak the best German" or "You shouldn't go to the south of Germany, Austria or Switzerland to learn German, they speak bad". 

In English, I see some discrimination and you can see some examples in videos of Italki teachers here. I have seen some introduction videos of some American teachers saying "Hi, I am bla bla, I am from Texas but I speak with a standard american accent". 

When someone uses "but", it's clear that that the person is trying to justify something "negative". What is the problem of having a Texan accent?

It's not an issue of intelligibility but of what's considered normal, the default. I can understand a person from the southern United States as well as a person from the Midwest. I can understand a French speaker from Nantes as well as someone from Paris. We've just been trained to say that one of them speaks "with an accent" while the other just speaks. Yet he too speaks with an accent, just one that has become regarded as "standard" at a particular point in time for arbitrary reasons.

Another question I find puzzling is related to broad generalizations such as, "Do people from Guadeloupe speak like people from France?" Which people from France? Even within France, accents vary greatly from region to region. It's the same thing in English. It seems to me that there is a lot of misinformation about accents circulating, based on cliches and prejudices. 

I mostly agree with the author. 

I'm going to go out on a limb, because this is something that rarely gets said out loud. When someone in the US calls something "uneducated English" or "bad English," and it is hard to understand what's so wrong with it, I think that the answer is often that the "uneducated" usage is common in black vernacular American English.

For a good illustration of this, the Urban Dictionary says:

"''be like:' Slang term typically used in urban ghettos and popularized on internet memes to mean: To act like, or to appear in a certain way."

So, a rare, but correct use of the subjunctive mood in English becomes "slang" if it is used in urban ghettoes.

Sad but true, we all trust the subculture we grew up as "right." Even small differences from our own subculture make us uncomfortable and produce traces of hostility, disguised as "joking" or "kidding." I am sorry to say that I used to tease my wife for "saying 'warsh' instead of 'wash.'" She teased me for pronouncing the -can in "pecan" as "can" rather than "con."

I won an argument with my high school English teacher when I showed him the place in the dictionary that said the pronunciation listed first was merely the "most frequent," not "preferred."

There's no easy answer for member of a subculture that experiences social discrimination by the dominant subculture. Pragmatically, it my be best just to conform or assimilate: straighten the hair, reduce the accent. But it is reasonable to ask members of the dominant subculture to accept an Hispanic accent as no different than Aunt Hannah from Pittsburgh saying "that needs fixed," or Grandpa Lou from Indianapolis pronouncing "caramel" as "cahrm'l."

The goal is to draw as many listeners as possible. It's a simple fact. Why would broadcasters speak in a way that does not draw the most listeners? 

No one complains about the neutral accent. Plenty complain about Deep South or New England accents. This might be hard for you to understand but that's how things are in the U.S. with its huge variety of accents. 

So again, the goal is to please as many ears as possible. If it's not pleasing to listen to and there is no intelligibility, there will be no listeners or viewers. Pretty simple.