Research task

Research Task

Accent relates only to pronunciation and intonation rather than grammar or vocabulary. If there's two people speaking the same language, who use the same grammar and lexical choices and the only difference between the way they speak is their accent then this indicates their social and regional origins, ethnic group membership or class. As listeners, we naturally pick up these indications about people’s ethnic, socioeconomic and geographical background. In addition, experimental research has shown that listeners can also make judgements on others’ intelligence, warmth and even height just by listening to recordings of accented speech.

Many studies from the UK, USA and Australia from the past six decades all show that foreign accented speech is negatively evaluated by native speakers of a language. People who view their own group or culture as the centre of everything are said to be ethnocentric. Ethnocentric people tend to
strongly identify with people in their own group and are biased against outsiders.

Sociolinguists have traditionally argued that accent accommodation can only happen through face to face interaction. However recent evidence from a number of studies is suggesting that this isn't the case and that engagement with TV programmes can have an influence on the way young peoples' speech develops.

Eckert and Cheshire

Eckert focused her observational research on social groups in America and what language they use to interact with one another. In order to do this she distinguished two groups within the high school, the 'jocks' who participated with school activities and were enthusiastic when doing so. The second group she decided to study was 'the burnouts' who refused to take part in school activities and had a negative attitude towards school life. She purposely choose groups of opposite characteristics in order for her results to be more distinctive. She found that people tended to speak similarly to the people that they interact with most often because they are the people they share the same social values as.

She found that 'the jocks' spoke with a sophisticated vocabulary to reflect their middle class background, whereas 'the burnouts' were not as concerned to how they may come across to other people when they speak so they used more exaggerated pronunciation associated with the urban accents of their neighbourhood.

She also studied the attitudes to language within the school, and found that 'the jocks' had preconceptions of 'the burnouts' because of their grammatical incorrect language and lack of articulation. Whilst 'the jocks' were seen as sounding like their parents.

Cheshire studied the use of grammatical variables and they link that has to peer groups culture by boys and girls in reading. She found that girls who didn't agree with the use of taboo words and the acts of violent behaviour tended to speak using standard English. However the girls who did agree with that type of behaviour spoke using incorrect grammar and pronunciation in their speech.

This study is similar to my findings of everyday life at school. I have recognised that there's a distinctive difference between they way people speak depending on what social group they are from. For example, when studying the way people in my year speak I looked at the differences between the way people on the school council speak in regards to the language they use, their pronunciation and their dialect as opposed to how the boys that are apart of he football academy speak. I noticed immediately that the two groups had completely different ways of speaking but the individuals amongst the same group spoke almost Identical to one another. This implies that your peers/ the people you surround yourself with on a daily basis have a significant influence on how you speak. I recognised that the people on the school council used language of a high register as well as pronouncing all of their words to a level considered to be standard English, which links to another feature that I picked up on, how strong their accents were. The people on the school council had a much less prominent 'Essex' accent in comparison to the boys that are apart of football academy. Due to the strong accent majority of the football academy boys obtain, this leads on to why the way they speak wouldn't be considered standard English because they do not pronounce their words in a way that is deemed correct. I also noticed that they used a lot of non fluency features in their speech such as 'like, err, umm' as well as a lot of colloquial language and taboo words. Finally they also shortened their sentences by using Ellison in their speech, for example 'gonna' instead of 'going to'. Whereas I noticed someone who is apart of the school council will use the full words instead of shortening them to speed up their conversation.