Accent Studies Flashcards
What did sue fox do?
She studied the dialect of youths with a variety of different ethnic backgrounds across London with influences from west India/ Africa
She coined the term MLE to describe a variety that she found being spoken
Her study suggested that MLE is identified with adolescents in the wider city environment of greater London
What did Sebbs do?
Sebbs studied new generation speakers born unto Londons Caribbean groups.
He characterised their speech as being between Caribbean creole forms, cockney forms and standard English and it combines phonological, lexical, grammatical elements of these three languages
What did Kerswill do?
Investigated dialect levelling
Dialect levelling is a form of standardisation whereby local variations of speech lose their distinctive regional features in favour of a more urban or mainstream dialect, this means that the speech forms of different parts of the country are becoming more similar over time and this results in a reduction in language diversity
What did Trudgill say?
Trudgill said he would strenuously dispute that EE is going to be the new RP
What did wells say?
Wells said that EE is not a new phenomenon But that the erosion of the English class system and the greater social mobility in Britain today means that this trend is more clearly noticeable than was once the case
Who coined EE?
Rosewarne
What did Giles do?
Carried out experiment in South Wales
A university lecturer delivered the same Talk to two matched groups of 16-18 year olds
He addressed the first talk in a Birmingham accent and the second with an RP accent
Those who heard RP talk gave higher intelligence rating
What types of RP did Gimson identify?
Conservative
Advanced
general
What types of RP did Wells identify?
Upper crust
Adoptive
Mainstream
What did Jones say about RP?
It used to be the accent associated with the educated but now RP sounds out of place and people use a neutralised version of their own regional accents in order to seem intelligent
What did Milroy do?
Milroy studied 3 inner city working class communities in Northern Ireland. Milroy found that variations in language could be explained by their social networks. Those with high density social networks had stronger accents
What did Giles do?
The capital punishment experiment. There were 5 groups of students. One group read a printed text, others had the text delivered in RP, Somerset accent, South Welsh, Birmingham. The participants were asked how impressed they were by the competence of the presentations.
The participants who received RP and the printed text were most impressed. Least impressed participants were those who experienced the speaker from Birmingham. However, regional accents scored more highly in persuasiveness
What did Trudgill do?
Observed whether the final sound of “singing” the speaker used the alveolar consonant or velar consonant. Found that men were less likely to use the prestige variant. He asked his subjects about their speech and found that men claimed to use prestige forms even more than observation showed
What did Labov do?
Focused on “r” sound as an indicator of social prestige. In US English, sounding the poet vocalic “r” is the prestige variant.
Investigated 3 different stores in New York, these were called Saks, Macy’s and S Klein
The people in the store were asked questions which they would be forced To answer with “fourth floor”
He noted the first response and then asked them to repeat it
The second time they would say fourth floor mire clearly
Saks pronounced prestige variant more
Macy’s less Frequent but greatest upward shift the second time
