attitudes to accent and dialect

Dixon, Mahoney and Cocks

• used match guise approach to research the correlation between criminals and the perception of accents (focus on Brummie accent)

• listeners were asked to report on the guilt/innocent of the same speaker (supposed criminal) speaking in a brummie accent and again in a more standard accent

• brummie accent was perceived to be more guilty

Howard Giles

• used matched guise

• two groups of 17 year old teens who listened to the same speaker use an RP accent then a brummie one

• they felt that the RP accent was more intelligent and the content of conversation held more value

Peter Trudgill

• RP speakers are perceived as haughty (stand off ish) and unfriendly by non-RP speakers unless they can demonstrate otherwise

• ALSO children with WC accents and dialects may be evaluated by some teachers as having less educational potential

migration- emerging variations

• we can often hear aspects of native tongue or dialect mixed with a regional accent to create a new dialect in itself

• examples of this are BAE (bradford asian english) or MLE (multicultural london english)

• MLE is a form of covert prestige- it suggests that some groups in this communities they have low social status and fewer opportunities due to their language so adapting it allows them to move away from the stigma and be free from discrimination (Paul Kerswill)

Howard Giles- accommodation theory

• in the 70s, Giles developed a theory that we adjust our speech to accommodate the person we are addressing

• convergence- more common, occurs when we move our speech closer to that of the other person (upward- regional moved towards RP and downward- RP moved towards regional)

• if both people converge, this is called mutual convergence

• divergence- when we move our speech styles further apart, usually used to emphasise difference

Labov- NY study 1966 (prestige)

• studied how often the final or pre-consonantal ‘r’ was used as this variable carried prestige in NY

• he looked at the speech of sales assistants in 3 department stores (Saks, Macys and Kleins)

• he asked them questions to elicit the answer ‘fourth floor’

• sales assistants from Saks used it most, Kleins leastbajd Macys showed the greatest upward shift when asked to repeat the answer

• the lower middle class were the most susceptible to the overt prestige of the presconsonantal ‘r’ - lower classes are more aware of the prestige and change the way they speak when asked to repeat themselves