a + d seneca

Question 1

Giles’ matched guise experiment

Answer 1

Matched guise experiment: listening to a speaker using a guise (put on accent) and rate that accent on various features
- giles’ research details that RP (Received Pronunciation) was seen as the most intelligent and prestigious, whereas regional accents were seen as friendlier or more honest
- ranked bottom for intelligence was the brummie accent

Question 2

Received Pronunciation

Answer 2

• posh sounding accent spoken by the queen, Oxford English Dictionary defines it as being a ‘standard accent’ of southern England
• phonological features:
  Use of the long /a:/ in words like ‘bath’
  H-retention (always pronounced)
  Non-rhoticity (not pronouncing the /r/ on words like ‘mother’)
  Conservative vowels
  You-coalescence

Question 3

Ways of looking at RP

Answer 3

• RP is prescriptivist - it is associated with standard English
• RP carries overt prestige - it has high status due to association with ‘the establishment’ and is labelled ‘the queens English’
• RP is an artificial construct - it doesn’t offer any clues about backgrounds, it is outdated (only about 2% of the population use it), and is universally recognised

Question 4

AC Gimson (theory of RP)

Answer 4

• argued in 1962 that there were times that RP could be a decided disadvantage, especially in social situations where empathy and affection are needed
• this is backed up by Linda mugglestone who believes that RP’s prestige is on the wane

Question 5

Giles (theory of RP)

Answer 5

• in giles’ capital punishment experiment, 5 groups of students were given the same script (four oral and one written)
• all were spoken in a different accent: RP, Somerset, Welsh and Brummie
• RP was rated highly in competency and reliability, but was rated low in persuasiveness and was seen as ‘posh and snobby’

Question 6

Giles and Powesland (theory on RP)

Answer 6

• had a speaker who delivered a talk about psychology to two sets of students
• one set had the talk performed with an RP accent and the other had the talk performed with a brummie accent
• the group voted the RP speaker as higher saying that the Brummie was less intelligent

Question 7

Case study: George osbourne

Answer 7

• whilst in his role as chancellor, osbourne was seen to drop his RP accent and use an accent closer to Estuary English when speaking to workers
• he used things like ‘kinda’ and ‘briddish’ instead of ‘kind of’ and ‘British’
• he was seen to be using his RP again in parliament

Question 8

The university of Aberdeen: Brummie accent

Answer 8

• conducted a study of jokes and they found that Brummie was often the funniest and RP was the least funny

Question 9

Worcester college: Brummie accents

Answer 9

• played participants clips from a police interview
• Brummie suspects were significantly more likely to be labelled as guilty, participants labelled the Brummie cent as more likely to be poor and working class

Question 10

Trudgill - traditional and main stream dialects

Answer 10

• trudgill believes that we can classify dialectal words into two categories:
  Traditional dialects use ‘old’ and often rural lexemes and grammatical constructions (through a process called lexical attrition these are dying out)
  Mainstream dialects are the more common lexical and grammatical, used by a majority within a geographical area

Question 11

Cockney rhyming slang (CRS)

Answer 11

• a dialectal variation found in London (not really now though) that originated from the criminal underworld in the 1800s as a way of communicating without the police knowing of their doings
  E.g. ‘brown bread’ for dead and ‘trouble and strife’ for wife
• crs stopped being used by criminals when it was adapted into common usage by non-criminals, it stopped being deictic

Question 12

Spreading of CRS

Answer 12

• ‘telling porky pies’ means ‘to tell lies’
• ‘donkeys ears’ which means years - often known now as ‘donkeys years’ so we can see the dialectal term has broadened and become part of common usage
• weakened version of crs used on east Enders

Question 13

Estuary English

Answer 13

• coined by linguist David rosewarne to describe the variation that arose from around the Thames estuary
• defined as a mix of RP and cockney

Question 14

Features of EE

Answer 14

• glottal stop
• dark /l/
• the (ow) pronunciation in words like mouth closer to words like hair
• th-fronting
  Paul coggle: it bridges the gap between cockney and RP

Question 15

Multicultural London English

Answer 15

• MLE is a variation that has arisen from migration bringing in speakers of English where English isn’t their first language
• these groups of speakers have led to this new variation being spoken very broadly in diverse inner-London cities (like hackney)
• Paul kerswill believes that within 30 years MLE will replace cockney completely

Question 16

Spreading of MLE

Answer 16

• has spread and is now becoming a part of the speech of teenagers up and down the country, spread mostly by grime music
• this issue for linguists comes when we have to draw the line between what an idiolect (your personal language), sociolect (the language of a social group) and dialect
• many new publications will use the term ‘jafaican’ to describe MLE (fake Jamaican)

Question 17

Features of MLE

Answer 17

• indefinite pronoun ‘man’
• ‘why…for?’ Question frame
• /h/ retention
• Jamaican slang like ‘blood’ for friend
• th-stopping