Dear Grandparenting: I was surprised to hear my grandchildren make fun of a dear friend of mine who came for dinner. Henry is from South Carolina. He is a wealthy chemical engineer with a bunch of patents to his name and no dummy.

My grandchildren didn’t know any of this. All they know is what they heard, and Henry must have seemed like a moron to them. All they talked about afterwards was how he “talks so funny.” They really got off on imitating his southern accent in gales of laughter.

I am extremely disappointed. They tuned Henry right out because he sounded different. Are all kids today this judgmental?

Here I thought the world was getting smaller with the Internet and all that, so grandchildren are exposed more to different nationalities. So one might naturally expect grandchildren would be more tolerant of language differences and dialects. What gives? Bill Hall, Nashua, New Hampshire

Dear Bill: We hope our answer is as good as your question. Grandchildren, like grandparents and everyone else, use visual cues about age, race and gender to make sense of their social world.

Most of us naturally prefer to make friends with people of similar age and race, but accents matter even more. When deciding whether persons belong in your social group, how they speak carries more weight than how they look.

For years, it was assumed to be the other way around. Then researchers started testing for language. In a Harvard University study of American 5-year-olds, children shown photographs of potential friends picked someone of the same race. But when the photos were paired with audio clips of their speech, white children preferred a black child who spoke their native language instead of a white child who spoke English with a foreign accent.

The reason, according to a University of Chicago study, is that accents undermine credibility. The thicker the accent, the less truthful the speaker is perceived to be.

Exposure to mass media and globalization is not making us all talk the same. We cling to local speech patterns to give us a sense of belonging and want to talk like the people we identify with.

Due to migrations to warmer climates and the rise of country music, Southern speech is now the dominant accent group in the U.S. As your grandchildren mature and get out in the real world, we suspect they’ll find more to admire about your successful friend, Henry. Big money isn’t funny.

GRAND REMARK OF THE WEEK

Grammy Mae from Waynesboro, Pennsylvanis, reports that she is “easy to please. I am so very grateful for any day I get to see my grandchildren smile.”