This exploratory inquiry tries to contribute to the study of the role of language in the process of social categorisation in South Africa. Specifically, it proposes an innovative mixed-method approach which establishes correlations between reaction times (RTs) towards selected accents obtained by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and participants’ linguistic background, language exposure and social distance levels. The inquiry has two main aims: (1) test the viability and efficacy of IAT in methodological and sociolinguistic terms and (2) study language attitudes towards two accents largely associated with white South Africans, Afrikaans-accented English and Standard South African English. The results of this methodological approach display overall consistency between the IAT results and the participants’ sociolinguistic background, which allows researchers to expand the use of this cognitive tool to the study of different sociolinguistic realities in the South African context.