Accent and Dialect theorists Flashcards
Howard Giles: Attitudes to the Liverpool accent
He conducted experiments that involved the same speaker performing a set of speech to different audiences, using a different accent each time. This method matched the guise technique. He related these findings to personality and status, and persuasiveness.
Julia Snell: Teeside Dialect
Snell concluded in her study of the Teeside dialect in two primary schools that ‘children used dialect forms that lack status within the dominant sociolinguistic economy in order to assert status in local interactions use’, showing that while certain forms of language might not be seen as prestigious or professional.
Rob Drummond: Accentism project
The accents project is run by Dr Erin Carrie and Dr Rob Drummond, who are both sociolinguists at Manchester Metropolitan university with a shared interest in language variation and change, language attitudes and perceptions, and the prejudice and discrimination shown towards regional social language varieties and their speakers - in particular, regional dialects, youth language and foreign accents.
Urszula Clarke: Accent and class stereotypes
“Speaking with a regional accent more likely indicated a working class background and state education for children, with various stereotypical characteristics assigned to different regions. So a West Country accent would be associated with being a country bumpkin and a lack of intelligence; a cockney accent with being untrustworthy and a Birmingham or West Midlands accent with stupidity.”
Rob Drummond: Polish People
Drummond investigated the extent to which polish people acquired the Manchester accent. He discovered that this was influenced by peoples future plans. People who intended to return to Poland still used polish pronunciation of words whereas those planning to stay in Manchester leant in to the English/Mancunian pronunciation.
Jenny Cheshire: Good Girls
Cheshire observed three groups of children in the playground at a school in reading. These included 13 boys and 12 girls who were recorded over 8 months. She looked for non-standard features in their language. She used a questionnaire to dived the girls into ‘good girls’ and ‘bad girls’. She found that girls tended to more than boys to alter their language to a prestige form when speaking to a teacher.
William Labov: Martha’s Vineyard
Study into how people adapt to accents and dialects over time. Looked at an island with 6,000 people but had over 40,000 visitors each summer. Residents adapted their speech to accommodate visitors and over many years islanders adapted their speech to the majority, and it became the norm. Younger generations spoke most like the visitors. Whereas fishermen and older generations adapted their language to sound less like the visitors to seek covert prestige.
Ruth Kirche and Sue Fox
They conducted on online survey of 800 Londoners to find out what sorts of attitudes that they had towards MLE. They asked several questions but overall on a five point scale MLE was scored a 2.2 on average.
University of Manchester
They found that Northern accents are becoming more similar and softer as the number of educated city-dwellers rises. Linguistic experts at the university found evidence of a pan-regional ‘general northern english’ accent among middle class northerners.
Paul Kerswill: MLE
Relatively few features of MLE can be proved to be Jamaican - its mainly the slang that reveals any Jamaican ancestry. MLE certainly isn’t fake Jamaican as the name ‘Jafaican’ suggests, it’s home grown. Broadly speaking its the descendants of the original immigrants who are most likely to speak MLE.
University of Aberdeen
After asking 4,000 people to listen to the same joke in 11 different regional accents, researchers form the University concluded that the Brummie accent is Britain’s funniest accent, appealing to more that 1/5 of those questioned. Whereas RP was at the bottom of the list appealing to only 1.1% of those questioned.
Carmen Llamas
Linguist Carmen Llamas came up with a good way of investigating lexical variation using Sense Relation Networks. A researcher asks participants to write down words that are in a semantic field. They would then discuss the dialectal words they use and the connotations that they have.
Coupland and Bishop
Scouse and Brummie rate lowly in the accent hierarchy.. C and B found that for social attractiveness accents such as Standard English, Southern Irish, and Scottish were generally positively rated whereas accents such as Birmingham, Glasgow and South African were typically downrated. They also found that for prestige, accents such as RP scores much higher in terms of prestige than it does in social attractiveness, whilst accents such as Brummie and South Asian rate lowly across both scales.
Devyani Sharma
She researched Punjabi-speaking Indians in west London. She found that one man spoke in an almost 100% Indian accent when speaking to a Sri Lankan maid and a 100% British accent when speaking to a mechanic who Sharma described as ‘cockney’. She also found that younger speakers did not adjectives their speech so much, arguing that perhaps there’s less need to in society.
Rob Drummond: MUBE
Its not only London that is an ethically diverse area in England. Rob Drummond coined the term MUBE to describe to describe people how each city has people who use shared features which maintain some accent features from their region, and also other influences.
