accent and dialect Flashcards
Who conducted the Norwich study, and when?
Trudgill in 1974
What were the findings of the Norwich Study?
- Individuals from lower social classes were more likely to use non-standard pronunciations
- looked at to what extent do different social classes and genders clip the velar nasal ‘ng’ sound at the end of words
- Trudgill was interested in the pronunciation of variables in different socio-economic status groups
What social variables did Trudgill look at?
social class - people belonging to higher social classes would use more standard language forms, where the higher the class, the closer to prestige varieties their language would be
gender
speech consciousness - language use would change depending on how conscious a person was of their speech
What where the two studies that Labov conducted?
New York Department Store Study - 1966
Martha’s Vineyard - 1972
What were the findings of the New York Department Store Study?
Labov assumed that the social stratification of the employees at the store would be in line with the social stratification of the department stores they worked at -> wanted to see whether the pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ or rhoticity changed depending on class.
- the employees with higher socio-economic status pronounced the post-vocalic /r/ more frequently than the employees with lower socioeconomic status.
What were the findings of the Martha’s Vineyard Study?
Examined the distribution of the articulation of the diphthongs/ai/ - the ‘igh’ sound in ‘kind’, ‘might’ and ‘try’ and /au/ - the ‘ow’ sound in ‘about’, ‘ground’ and ‘out’
- they vineyarders centralised these sounds to varying degrees, meaning that the initial /a/ sound was produced with the tongue in a more central position in the mouth
- the study showed that language use was related to social variables such as loyalty with the middle-aged fisherman remaining true to the native sound of the diphthongs.
Who conducted the Belfast study, and when?
Milroy in 1975
What were the findings of the Belfast study?
This study showed that people used more non-standard forms of the observed variables when they came from lower social classes.
The study observed 2 phonological variables:
- (th) phoneme in ‘mother’ and ‘father’
- (a) phoneme in ‘hat’ ‘cat’ and ‘sat’
What is the difference between a closed network and an open network?
closed network = where the people a person is in contact with are also in contact with each other
open network = the people don’t necessarily know each other
What is a Network Strength Score?
a score based on the person’s knowledge of other people in the community, the workplace and at leisure activities to give a score of 1 to 5
- a high score is correlated with the use of vernacular or non-standard forms
Who conducted the Reading study and when?
Jenny Cheshire in 1982
What were the findings of the Reading study?
Found a high level of non-standard forms in adolescents
e.g.
- (s) inflection
- multiple negation
- use of ‘ain’t’
- non-standard ‘was’ and ‘what’ e.g. ‘you was telling me’
- non-standard use of the verb ‘come’ e.g. ‘I come here yesterday’
Boys tended to use more non-standard forms than girls
Who conducted the Milton Keynes study and when?
Paul Kerswill in 1999
What were the findings of the Milton Keynes study?
Kerswill investigated 10 speech sounds that had different pronunciations in Milton Keynes
-focused on 48 children: 16 four year olds, 16 eight year olds and 16 twelve year olds and one of their caregivers
- he concluded that younger speakers in Milton Keynes are helping to create a new dialect -> the children on avg front their vowel sounds also the use of the glottal stop by which ‘letter’ becomes ‘le-er’
What is dialect levelling?
the process by which the differences and variations between certain dialects are reduced or eliminated over time
- the dialects experience standardisation, eliminating the distinctiveness of each dialect and establishing a singular mainstream dialect
