Barcelos, A.M. F. (2003). What is wrong with a Brazilian accent? Horizontes de Linguistica Aplicada, vol. 2, n.1, p. 7-21. What’s wrong with a Brazilian accent? Ana Maria Ferreira Barcelos Universidade Federal de Viçosa RESUMO: Este artigo relata resultados de um estudo em que as atitudes de brasileiros, reveladas na mídia escrita, em relação ao sotaque estrangeiro e ao próprio sotaque quando falando inglês são investigadas. Através da análise de conteúdo de artigos de jornais e de revistas, os resultados indicaram que existe uma crença comum de que sotaque estrangeiro é algo a ser eliminado da aprendizagem de línguas. Além disso, a análise dos artigos sugere um preconceito contra certas variedades de inglês. O artigo traz implicações de tais atitudes e conclui com sugestões para uma reflexão no ensino de línguas. PALAVRAS CHAVE: sotaque, ensino de línguas, atitude. 1. Introduction _ I don’t have an American or a British accent. _What’s wrong with a Brazilian accent? This conversation took place in 1990, one year after I graduated from college with a degree in Portuguese and English. I was talking to an American who was visiting Brazil. For the first time, somebody had questioned the belief that I should sound as a native speaker of those varieties of English (American or British)– a belief that is indeed part of the culture of learning and teaching English in Brazil, as I try to show in this paper. Accent in a foreign language is considered one of the many aspects of individual differences in language learning (Ellis, 1994). Some researchers have suggested that there is a critical period for learners to acquire native-like proficiency (Long, 1990, cited in Ellis, 1994). Others have argued that it is almost impossible for language learners to acquire a native-like pronunciation (Garret, 1992; Morley, 1991) or even desirable (Strevens, 1997). These studies often focus on phonological and phonetic aspects of accent. But few studies have addressed social attitudes towards