The way you talk affects career advancement. Here’s how.

Your next chance at a promotion may come down to how you talk. A working paper from Harvard Business School argues that workers’ careers are often influenced by their speech patterns—not because those patterns are associated with merit, but because managers are inclined to think workers who communicate similarly have better social skills. Drawing on decades of labor-market data and audio recordings, researchers found that workers whose communication style matched a workplace’s norm were more likely to be tapped for the “people-oriented, socially intensive roles” that often result in career advancement. The researchers analyzed the career impact of having a Southern U.S. accent in the South and Midwest compared to the Northeast and West, finding that Southern speakers were more likely to have socially intensive roles in regions where their accent is more common. They also found that for women and minority groups like Black Americans, and Latin American immigrants, the increase in “social task-intensive” employment since 1980 has been concentrated in areas where their group is well represented in the labor market—i.e., Latin Americans are more likely to be tapped for people-oriented…