Accent and Dialect - language A level

Capital Punishment Experiment

• Giles carried out some research into attitudes towards accents

• Groups of students listened to presentations about capital punishment by speakers with the follow accents

• 1) Somerset 2)South Welsh 3) Birmingham 4)RP

• Students were asked which one they found most and least impressive

• Most impressive was RP

• Least impressive was Birmingham

• The rest were almost equally chosen as most persuasive (regional)

The BBC

• Have traditionally been associated with RP speakers

• In 2008 the Director General of the BBC called for more regional accents after viewers complained and said they were being ignored/not represented

Alison Smith Study (2017)

• 6 Accents were chosen

• RP, Edinburgh, Cardiff (Usually seen as positive)

• Liverpool and Somerset (Usually seen as negative)

• Participants(UK and American) were asked to rate spears on a variety of characteristics such as friendliness and attractiveness

• It was seen that Americans ranked all accents higher on average

• British ranked more rural areas lower

• Southern accents ranked higher

• Liverpool ranked lowest

Petyt’s Bradford Study

• Looked at speakers in Bradford dropping their h at the start of words

• 94% of lower working class dropped it

• 12% of upper middle class dropped it

• Therefore there is a direct correlation between accent and social class

Labov’s post-vocalic r (1966) USA

• Pronouncing your post-vocalic r is seen as prestigious in the USA

• Similarly to how pronouncing your h is in the UK

• Labov found that upper middle class speakers used the post vocalic r more often than lower middle class speakers in casual speech

• However in formal speech, it was the opposite

• Lower middle classes may have been over-compensating for their perceived lack of status

The difference in UK vs USA demonstrates how arbitrary (baseless) attitudes towards accents are

Accommodation theory

• changing the way that you speak depending on your audience

• Giles developed it in 1970

• We change how we speak to children to help them comprehend,

• Change the way we interact with the elderly to display respect Giles and McCann 2006

• job interviews, friends, parents

• We change in 5 ways

• Convergence

• Divergence

• Mutual convergence

• Upward convergence

• Downward convergence

Divergence

• When we emphasise the differences in our language in opposition of the other persons accent

• Football fans who have travelled to an away game would emphasise their regional accent and dialect

• They do this to convey pride in their regional identity and to convey pride in their class

Mutual Convergence

• When two speakers both tone down their accents

• University students from different areas of the country in shared accommodation all begins to speak in a similar way blended accent/dialect

• To show solidarity and to signify their membership of the group

Upward convergence

• a person trying to make their speech sound more upper class to match the other person

• Students from abroad attending elocution lessons

• To indicate they are of a higher social status, to secure a a better job and to impress others

Downward convergence

• when a person of a higher class tones down their language to be understood/accepted by a lower/more uneducated class

• Politicians such as George Osbourne trying to appeal to working class audiences

• To disguise upper class privilege, to create a friendlier persona and to appear more relatable

Dialect lexis

• arse - bum - cockney

• Bairn - child - Scotland

• Ginnel- path between houses - Yorkshire

• Brew - cup of tea - Lancashire

Cockney rhyming slang examples

• Apples and Pears - stairs

• Scooby Doo - clue

• Pork is Pies - lies

• Wallace and Gromit - vomit

Cockney Rhyming Slang

• originated in the East end of London during the first half of the 19th century

• First used by street sellers, beggars and petty criminals

• Works by replacing a work with a rhyming word or expression

• It is so well used its origins are often forgotten

• It has become widespread

Estuary English

• Originated in the South East

• Named after the Thames Estuary

• Was first names in the 1980s by David Roseworn

• It has spread to other parts of the country

Estuary English - Features

• standard grammar

• L-vocalisation (miwk)

• Glottal stops replacing ‘t’ sounds

• happY-tensing (hapee, vallee)

• Yod coalescence - using a ch and y sound in words such as Tuesday

• It is a modified cockney but has no h-dropping and no th-fronting (RP and cockney)

Effects of Estuary

• L-vocalising is spreading

• Adopted as people stop conforming to RP (divergence)

• Picked up mostly by young people

• Some people argue it is taking over RP

• 1993 Sunday times said it was sweeping across Britain

• 1995 The conservative minister of education said that teachers have a duty to eradicate it

Why is Estuary English spreading?

• movement of Londoners away from the capital

• Upward convergence -cockneys have modified their speech closer to RP

• downward convergence- some do speakers adopt EE to conform to the rest of society

• It is considered fashionable and ‘classless’

• Prevalent in mass media ‘Language of the disk jockey ‘ (radio)

Why do some people see Estuary English as good?

• it is classless (less judgement)

• Uses standard grammar

• Mutual intelligibility

• Non-threatening

• Ease of articulation

• No dialect + accent markers

• Cool + relaxed

Why do some people see Estuary English as bad ?

• it is replacing cockney and the regional identity

• Seen as less professional

• Decline in RP seen as a decline is societal standards

• Politicians using it can be seen as manipulating

• Stigmatised ?

Kerwell and Williams Study 1994

• Found that children in Milton Keynes speech contained more features of Estuary English than their parents

• Suggests young people are drivers of change

Multicultural London English

• Pul Kerswell ‘one of the mechanisms when people find themselves unable to progress in life or are discriminated against is to speak differently as an exclusionary strategy’

• Therefore language = identity

• Ali G speaks MLE

• Caribbean, South Asian, Cockney and Estuary roots

• Most prevalent in East London (least affluent)

• Most of the slang is Afro-American and Jamaican in origin

• Picked up at a young age, particularly in schools where 50% of students have English as an additional/secondary language

• MLE is replacing cockney

MLE slang and origins

Mandem and Bare - Afro - Caribbean

Bruv - bro - 1970/80 Black American speech

Ends - Jamaican Slang

• ‘They’re from ends’ - they’re from my area

• ‘Thanks bruv’ - thanks mate

• ‘I’m out with the mandem’ - I’m out with my friends

Language and identity in MLE

• recent study revealed that several teenagers in the study used lexis from Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean origin despite being white British

• Suggests language may be more linked to group identity than ethnic or cultural background

Paul Kerswell - Dialect Levelling

• he says a reason for this is due to a reduction in rural employment

• 90% of people lived in cities in 1991 compared to 30% in 1831

• He also says it could be due to more social mobility (moving between social classes)

• Also due to increase interaction between people with different varieties of speech

Leslie Milroy 2002

• suggested increased geographical mobility leads to large-scale disruption of close-knit localised networks

Predictions of dialect levelling

• RP will die out

• Immigration with make certain regional accents stronger

• MLE will prevail in urban areas

• Dialect lexis + grammar will become less widespread

Survivors of dialect levelling

• Addition of present tense (I knows that)

• Multiple negation (ain’t nobody got time for that)

• use of ain’t

• Use of them instead of those (look at them trees)

Why dialect may be levelling more

• People travel more

• Some dialect stop being regional because it spreads to other parts

• Compulsory education (1898) is encouraged to use standard English

• Media means we hear different dialect and I’m more likely to hear standard English

Martha’s Vineyard general info

• it is an island lying about 3 miles off New England of the coast of the United States of America

• population around 6000

• 40,000 visitors over the summer

• The Eastern part of the island is densely populated with a residence and is mostly visited by summer visitors

• The Western third is strictly rural with a few villages and there is an area called Chillmark

• 2.5% of the population who fish are mostly in the Chillmark area

• They are the most close-knit social group on the island and have strong uses of diphthongs (two vowel sounds)

Labovs study - Martha’s Vineyard

• Young people on Martha’s Vineyard has started to adopt pronunciations closer to Characteristics resembling the Chilmark people

• the heaviest users of this were young men who had been to college and wanted to identify themselves as vineyarders.

• The college men were the heaviest uses of the vernacular vowels (regional)

Dialect Grammar