This project examines the formation of accent attitudes, focusing on the generation of attitudinal lexicon, the components comprising accent attitudes, the attitude holders' awareness of those components, as well as the social construction of accent overall. Sociolinguistics studies have extensively investigated what the attitudes toward accents are (e.g. friendly-unfriendly and intelligent-unintelligent) (Coupland & Bishop, 2007; Giles, 1970), but the factors that participate in the formation of accent attitudes have not been thoroughly investigated. The project uses minimally restrictive techniques in an attempt to elicit novel scalar accent-evaluative adjectives within the sociolinguistic context of the UK. Those adjectives are then used in evaluative scales of subsequent studies. The accents under examination are Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, and Standard. Along with the collected evaluative adjectives, the project uses written messages to determine whether accent attitudes are formed based on cognition (knowledge/beliefs) or affect (emotions/feelings). The written messages contain accent-attitudinal discursive elements from media like newspapers to test whether the argument that media meta-language influences accent ideology (Mugglestone, 2007) is reflected in the data. The participants' meta-attitudinal awareness of the contextual formative influences on their own accent attitudes, inclusive of the written messages and evaluative adjectives, is examined through semi-structured interviews. In the context of the aforementioned studies, the social construction of accent and the use of the term 'accentism' are discussed. Results show that accent attitudes seem to be formed socio-contextually. Particularly, the use of minimally restrictive elicitation techniques (contextual influence) prompted the emergence of novel accent-attitudinal lexicon. Further, media meta-language appeared to have an impact on accent attitudes, as the media-like messages significantly affected the attitudes to the varieties: the attitudes to the Standard accent were significantly influenced by the cognitive messages and adjectives, and the attitudes to the Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Newcastle accents were significantly influenced by the affective messages and adjectives. The more knowledge-based attitudes to the Standard accent can find direct parallels to the standardist ideology in education, a knowledge-based domain. In turn, the participants were aware of the influence of the messages, the adjectives, and other socio-contextual factors, such as collective accent attitudes and personal relationships, on their accent attitudes. As these results support the social construction of accent attitudes (e.g. Giles, Bourhis, Trudgill & Lewis, 1974), the features that make accent itself a social construct (akin to ability, gender, and race, among others) are scrutinised, and more frequent use of the term 'accentism' (akin to ableism, genderism, and racism, among others) by sociolinguists is advocated to increase public awareness regarding that form of discrimination. The findings of this project contribute to our understanding of how accent attitudes are formed (i.e. based on cognitive and affective, contextual and social sources) and, by extension, how accentist attitudes are formed, which can advance the public recognition and problematisation of accentism.
| Date of Award | 31 Dec 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | - The University of Manchester
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| Supervisor | Alexander Baratta (Supervisor), Marije Van Hattum (Supervisor) & Wendell Kimper (Supervisor) |
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