Transcript The University of Sheffield: PowerPoint template

Investigating attitudes to
language
Aims
• To think about attitudes to accents and
dialect
• To find out what people have discovered
about attitudes
• To think about how these attitudes might
affect how we study accents and dialects
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
What we’ll achieve by the end of
today’s class
• You’ll be able to think about the
connections between accents and dialects
and attitudes
• You’ll have an idea about some of the
difficulties of studying accents and dialects
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
What accents did the voices
have?
• Sample A
= Barnsley (Yorkshire = NE England)
• Sample B
= London (SE England)
• Sample C
= Liverpool (Merseyside = NW England)
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Are our findings typical?
• Compare our results with what Chris
Montgomery found when the samples
were judged by speakers from Northern
England (see handout)
• What’s similar?
• What’s different?
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Common findings
• Everyone usually rates a standard accent as ‘competent’
• intelligent, ambitious, confident, ‘correct’
• People usually rate (most) nonstandard accents as
‘socially attractive’
• Friendly, honest, attractive, sense of humour
• But there may be differences based on where you are
from
• For instance: places like Liverpool often produce extreme
responses
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Where do our view about language
come from?
• When we judge an accent, we tend to judge the
things we associate with the accent, rather than
the accent itself
• What do you think when you think of big cities?
• Urban, industrialised, grime, unemployment, high crime rate
• What do you think when you think about local
communities or regions?
• Friendliness, strong social ties
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Do we judge accents on
LANGUAGE?
• Correlation between language and social
characteristics
• Positive evaluation of a region’s identity:
speech typical of that region = good
• Negative evaluation of a region’s identity:
speech typical of that region = bad
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Judging accents
• When we hear a standard accent, we think
about education and ‘official’ contexts
rather than location
• So we tend to think about Standard English
speakers as ‘intelligent’ and nonstandard
speakers as ‘friendly’ (but not, necessarily
intelligent!)
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Standard English and
‘correctness’
• Most people think Standard English is
better than other varieties
• How is Standard English useful?
• Widespread communication
• Efficiency
• Ability to communicate appropriately in official
settings
16/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
100
Years
Of
Excellence.