Daily Mail article - attitudes to accents - Tuesday 15th

My intended target audience will be 'The Daily Mail' readers who are interested in changing accents and dialects, and people who have prescriptive and descriptive views on the subject.


Is Received Pronunciation the only respectable accent?

Map of Great Britain and Ireland
showing results of a survey of
most favoured accents

For decades, controversy has filled the topic of conversation on regional dialects and accents defining who we are and our intelligence, with the country torn between believing that they are a part of our unique identity and a rich factor in our social and regional upbringing, adding a so called 'spice' or 'flavour' to the way our country's mode of talk operates, whereas many believe quite the opposite that strong regional accents have an undesired effect on the way we speak and effectively dampens the quality and eloquence of Received Pronunciation. However, in the scheme of things our country would seem pretty boring and dull if we all spoke in the same accent and dialect, don't you think?

Giles' matched guise technique found that Received Pronunciation is the most impressive and influential accent when imposing certain arguments, and that the brummie accent was the least desirable and imposing; however these arguments coming from a variety of accents and regional dialects were all the same, showing that, with the same concept of speech being heard from different accents, people still judge them differently on how convincing and appealing they are. Although the study was 40 years ago, the image to your right still shows results of brummie being the least favourable accents; showing that stereotypical judgment is still occurring today, and presumably in everyday life. Along with this, we frequently hear people saying that people cannot present on national television because of their accent being 'too strong' or 'not neutral enough'; is this the harsh truth, or are people actually discriminating?

Throughout the world and especially in our country, people are constantly trying, possibly when they move homes or cities or during university, to get along with people, many a time in which people from different regions of our land using different dialects and strong opposite accents occur - when this happens, do we have to hide our true prescriptive thoughts of other 'snotty' accents, or shall we actually enjoy experiencing other fascinating accents and become descriptive people? Shall we judge or explore? This can occur from a wide scale of accents deemed acceptable or unacceptable; so called posh people may make judgements on a strong regional accent like scouse, and then a scouse may judge a more standard pronunciation accent. Will our country ever truly get along, or will we just act as if we do?

If received pronunciation is considered to be the 'correct' accent to talk with, then why is it that only 2% of the population of England speak that way. That statistic along with many others show the wide cultural diversity our country has, we should be embracing it, not being hypocritical about it and make judgements on people purely because of their accent.

Studies show that over a few decades, 'the forms and norms of received pronunciation inevitably drift, it is influenced by the Southern British Speech Community', and this quote is backed up by analysts stating that the Queen has over the years been slowly trying to converge with the people, as her received pronunciation 'levels' have gradually dropped; so, this shows that RP may not be the wanted accent after all!

Accents and dialects findings from a class survey

                                                   Very   Fairly    Neither nor   Not very    Not at all
Received Pronunciation
Friendly                                       0         3           3                       6                1
Intelligent                                    10       4           0                       0                0
Trustworthy                                 1        6            6                       1                0
Brummie
Friendly                                      0         8            4                       2                0
Intelligent                                   0         0            2                       9                3
Trustworthy                                0         4            7                       2                1
Scouse
Friendly                                      0         7            4                       1                0
Intelligent                                   1        4            5                        4                  0
Trustworthy                                1        6            4                        2                 1


Resulting from our class findings, received pronunciation was deemed, by a considerable margin, the most intellectual sounding accent, with all 14 class members in favour of it sounding intelligent; this is a huge contrast compared to brummie, with not one student thinking it sounded intelligent - 9 thought it sounded unintelligent. The scouse accent seemed fairly neutral when asked about if it sounded intelligent; from these findings, a correlation may be made from how strong the accents are and less alike to RP, the more unintelligent it sounds.


The roles seem to reverse when consulted about the accents friendliness; nearly half the class deemed RP sounding unfriendly, compared to 8 people finding the brummie accent friendly, and 7 people finding the scouse accent of the same degree of friendliness. This could lead to a stereotype that people make - the more friendly a person/accent sounds, the less intelligent they are, and vice versa.
A slight anomalie is found in the scouse data, with just 1 person deeming it unfriendly; however, this could be because the person who casted that vote was originally from Liverpool, and therefore may have used inside information as they know what people from Liverpool are actually like.


This information links to Giles' matched guise technique around 40 years ago, where his investigation resulted in similar findings; students listened to different accents and judged which sounded the most convincing when expressing arguments. RP was deemed the most commanding, with brummie the least convincing, showing that the same judging and feelings about accents still occur in our modern era.

Giles' matched guise technique research

Giles matched guise technique

The matched guise test is a sociolinguistic experimental technique used to determine the views and feelings of people towards a certain dialect or accent.

The experiment revolves around a procedure of a variety of different students, acting as ‘judges’, listening to what they believe are different people’s accents and dialects (social and regional), and then evaluating their personal qualities solely based on their voice.       

However, they do not know that the ‘different people’ is just a single person speaking in the different accents heard. The test was executed by the listeners not able to see the speaker, therefore allowing them not to know it was the same person. This focuses on the findings that the judges solely judge the person by their accent, as the way of speaking and everything else is the same bar the accent. The topic talked about in the different accents were arguments against capital punishment – the arguments were completely identical; this allowed Giles to understand how persuasive the listeners found the speakers, despite the fact each argument was identical.

Findings

The students listening concluded that Received Pronunciation was the most impressive and influential, and the Brummie accent was the least imposing and convincing.

The information found from this technique closely matches similar research done in recent times; in 2014 a survey found that the Brummie accent was the least attractive, showing similar results are found over 40 years on.

Limitations

The judges may eventually understand midway through the recording that the ‘different speakers’ are only in fact the single person. This may lead to their results being untrue and therefore unreliable.

https://quizlet.com/5883513/english-accents-and-dialects-flash-cards/