Language and Region

Question 1

Choy and Dodd

Answer 1

Teachers make judgements on a student’s ability on their personality based on the way they speak

Question 2

Trudgill

Answer 2

Trudgill’s study on the effects of social class on language use explored the differences between working and middle class backgrounds in their pronunciation of certain sounds, including the velar nasal /n/ at the end of words like ‘running’. He concluded that changing the velar nasal /n/ to an alveolar /n/ - saying ‘runnin’ instead of ‘running’ - was more likely to feature in working-class speech than in middle-class speech, although he also found differences between men’s and women’s use of the non-standard forms. He estimated that only 3% of speakers used RP.

Question 3

Milroy

Answer 3

Milroy found the stronger the social network the greater the use of vernacular (everyday, informal, non-standard, spoken language) or non-standard linguistic features.
They also show that apparent norms, like women’s well-documented preference for prestige forms (hypercorrection), can be reversed (consciously or otherwise) by the need to express something more.

Question 4

Giles (matched-guise)

Answer 4

This involves participants listening to the same speaker using a range of different accents and then passing judgement on each different variation.
In terms of personality, RP was seen as the most confident, intelligent and ambitious, but also cold and ruthless. Northern accented speech was characterized as honest, reliable, generous, sincere, warm and humorous. The factor of persuasiveness is more complex to analyse because someone can seem persuasive because of social status, or friendliness, so persuasiveness isn’t really an independent dimension.

Question 5

Rosewarne

Answer 5

David Rosewarne coined the term ‘Estuary’ in 1984. He described the accent as ‘modified regional speech’ and placed it along a continuum between RP and Cockney. Many linguists see it as an Umbrella term, covering a range of southern English dialects

Question 6

Jones

Answer 6

Jones was a descriptivist linguist, but also a man of his time. In the early 20th century, teachers of English were seen as ‘missionaries’ of speech, whose job it was to ‘correct’ aspects of regional language by removing them and replacing them with RP and standard English, which were seen as hallmarks of retirement.

Question 7

Ives

Answer 7

Ives commission 2 studies to be carried out in London and Bradford in order to explore the new dialects which had a growing use of code-switching. In each study the participants were questioned and subsequently discussed their language use, and more specifically, their dialect. Some of the key features of the dialect he found were replacing Standard English verb form, changing a noun to a verb (Hype-Hyping) and changing an abstract noun to a less abstract form.

Question 8

Foulkes and Docherty

Answer 8

In their book ‘Urban Voices’ Foulkes and Docherty discuss the replacement of ‘th’ with ‘f’ or ‘v’ and how this phonological variant has spread from its original origins in London.

Question 9

Seligman, Tucker and Lambert

Answer 9

Teachers’ perceptions of students were heavily influenced by their speech