Regional, national and international (Global English) varieties.

Question 1

Theory

Answer 1

Language differs depending on where you are from. This varies lexically, grammatically and phonologically.

Question 2

Giles

Answer 2

Matched guise experiment found that speakers of RP were judged as: intelligent, trustworthy, unfriendly and unsociable.

Question 3

Kerswill

Answer 3

Through a process called dialect levelling, accents and dialects are becoming more similar.

Question 4

Mugglestone

Answer 4

The number of RP speakers is decreasing.

Question 5

Giles and Powesland

Answer 5

Psychology lecturer experiment:
The same lecture delivers two identical lecturers to two groups using RP and the Birmingham accent. They found that the Brummie speaker was rated as less intelligent and was rated less favourably overall.

Question 6

Mahoney et al

Answer 6

Guilt experiment:
Students were played recordings of fake police interviews of suspects with different accents. Brummie accents were more likely to be judged as guilty.

Question 7

Giles

Answer 7

Capital punishment study:
Five groups of students were given information about the capital punishment in five different ways - four were lectures speakers with RP, Somerset, South Welsh and Brummie accents and the final group were given the written equivalent. Giles found that:
- The RP speaker and the written presentation were the most impressive.
- Brummie was the least impressive.
- The RP speaker and the written presentation were more likely to change the students minds.

Question 8

General

Answer 8

American English contains a number of features which are different to British English: ‘fall for autumn’.

Question 9

Engel

Answer 9

Hates Americanisms and claims that they are ruining British English. He believes that there is a huge identity issue with British English.

Question 10

Algeo

Answer 10

American English is expanding British English, and this is a good thing.

Question 11

Crystal

Answer 11

Colonisation isn’t the only reason for the spread - the power associated with the countries who speak English furthers its spread.

Question 12

McArthur

Answer 12

His model suggests that you can group different varieties of English together and this model does not give focus to any particular variety, showing them all as equal.

Question 13

Graddol

Answer 13

English may lose its popularity as other languages become more dominant like Mandarin or Spanish.

Question 14

Crystal

Answer 14

Different places adopt and adapt English to suit their needs.