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.
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