When I was studying socio-linguistics, I remember an experiment that involved playing recordings of various English regional accents to two groups of people. The first group were English and they were asked to list the accents in order from favourite to least favourite. Birmingham and Liverpool were at the bottom and West Country at the top; but, interestingly, when the same recordings were played to the second group, Americans, the results were very different. This suggests that English listeners ratings involved certain prejudices.