Theory: Regional and National Varieties Theorists, Experiments and Studies Flashcards
Giles: Matched guise experiment?
Matched guise experiment found that speakers of RP were judged as:
• Intelligent
• Trustworthy
• Unfriendly
• Unsociable
Kerswill: Dialect Levelling?
Through a process called dialect levelling, accent and dialects are becoming more and more similar.
Mugglestone: RP speakers?
The number of RP speakers is decreasing.
Harrington: the Queen’s speeches?
Over a period of 50 years, the Queen’s speeches have been diverging from RP.
Giles and Powsland: Psychology lecture experiment?
The same lecturer delivered two identical lectures 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.
Montgomery: Adverts?
RP is used in adverts for technical descriptions. Regional accents are used for other things, particularly food.
Harbridge: Joke study.
Survey 4000 people to find the funniest accent. It concluded:
• Brummie was the funniest.
• Liverpudlian accent was the next funniest.
• RP was the least funny.
Trudgill: archaic pronouns?
The archaic forms of the second person pronouns, thee and thou, are still used in Yorkshire.
Mahoney et al: 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.
Giles: Capital punishment study?
Five groups of students were given information about capital punishment in five different ways – four lectures from 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 most likely to change the students’ minds.
Rosewarne: Estuary English?
Coined the term
‘Estuary English’ to describe the language of the people who live near the Thames estuary. This variety contains the following variations:
• Phonological - there is a glottal stop, yod-coalescence, TH-fronting and h-dropping.
• There are no noticeable, lexical or grammatical differences.
Coggle: bridge?
Estuary English acts as a bridge between Cockney and RP.
Dent: birthmarks?
Accents are like spoken birthmarks.
Watt’s Dialect Levelling Study, Newcastle (2005)?
Stated that motivation for linguistic changes came from young speakers who wanted to dispel the “cloth, cap and clogs” image, and sound like “modern northerners”. They avoided certain variants or marked features of the Geordie dialect (non-rhotic pronunciation, r dropped at the end of syllables, “car” becomes “caah”) whilst adopting some features not linked to their dialect (“bare” meaning “a lot” or “lit”). They didn’t, however, wish to show disloyalty to their geographical area by showing massive variation; others accommodate towards these new accent forms due to their “social attractiveness”.
