Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Accent and dialect - Coggle Diagram
Accent and dialect
RP
-
-
Mainstream RP - considered extremely neutral in terms of signals regarding age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker
-
-
Jonathan Harrington (2000) found evidence of RP accent change in Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas Broadcasts over three periods: 1950s, late 19060s/early 70s, 1908s.
Her language was influenced by southern accents of the 1980s, associated with lower social hierarchy
Giles and Trudgill (separately) find that RP speakers are rated more highly than speakers with a regional accent in terms of general competence in the Matched Guise Experiments, however less well for qualities such as friendliness and humour
Howard Giles (1973) Capital Punishment experiment suggests that greater accent prestige creates greater perceived quality of argument. Listeners were most impressed by RP speakers
Diphthongs rather than monophthongs, for example in interrogative clause 'can you pass the jam?', the concrete noun jam would be produced /dʒæm/ rather than /dʒam/
Dialect levelling
-
-
We are moving towards a national dialect, which is likely to be RP
Leslie Milroy (2002) suggests increased geographical mobility disrupts close-knit, localised networks with structured linguistic norms
Paul Kerswill (2001) - process of language from different regions converging and becoming more similar over time. Kerswill suggested that the reduction of rural employment and increased interaction with other speech varieties in suburbs and new towns as well as increased social mobility may be causes
-
Brummie
Andersson and Trudgill (1990) argued that attitudes are based on social connotations rather than the sound itself. Americans who lack cultural capital do not find the Birmingham accent unpleasant, but UK speakers disagree.
Howard Giles Capital punishment experiment, deemed less prestigious and therefore less persuasive
-
-
Cockney Rhyming slang
Museum of London (2012) - proposed that Cockney Rhyming slang is dying out and many Londoners no longer understand (e.g 'mother hubbard' for 'cupboard')
David Crystal (2012) - argued Cockney Rhyming slang is not dying out but has been reincarnated by modern cultural obsession with celebrities adding additional terms (e.g 'Wallace and Gromit' = 'vomit')
Cockney also produce the final nasal /n/ in the inflectional bound morpheme -ing when producing the progressive aspect, for example /siŋin/
-
William Labov (1961)
-
Labov found that different social groups on the island pronounced certain diphthongs differently to establish an identity of themselves as Vineyards to distance themselves from tourists
Scouse
-
ComRes survey found Liverpool as the most unfriendly, most unintelligent, most untrustworthy
Dominic Watt (2010)
Identified that super urban accents seem to be spreading out from their traditional bases and into new territory while local accents disappear
-
Jenny Cheshire (1981)
Described syntactic and semantic functions of 'ain't' in adolescent speech in Reading, suggesting links to the vernacular subculture of the groups
-
West country
Post-vocalic /r/ phoneme appears after the vowel (known as rhotic accents) for example /ka:r/ /ga:rdən/