My article will be targeted towards people who read the Guardian.
Does your accent determine who you are as a person? And are accents changing?
There is a huge range of different accents and dialects throughout the United Kingdom which can be analysed by the public as the best and the absolutely terrible. In my opinion and many others the accent from a person is something unique to them and it is something to be proud of but that is not always peoples views.
In the 1970's a matched guise test was done to collect the views of people on accents in the UK. The test recorded what they saw as the most impressive and influential accent being said. The outcome was that the Brummie accent was seen as the least impressive and had little influence on people being talked about a certain subject. On the other hand at the top of the leader board was the received pronunciation. Even though this was done over 40 years ago this view is still among people today and can be supported by many recent surveys in the United Kingdom.
The surveys record various views on how intelligent or friendly an accent is to name a few. The fact that people will quickly judge someone as soon as they open their mouth on who they are personally is complete nonsense in my opinion. I mean just because your from Birmingham and have a very strong accent does that mean you are not intelligent enough to get a high grade in education? obviously not. So why do people instantly judge without actually finding out about the person first?
We are judged in a variety of ways for the way we speak. In the past it was very easy to separate people into by listening to their accent but now due to how easy it is to travel around the world and the many people moving to various places to work and learn it does not become as a surprise that we are all becoming more similar in how we speak and it is more difficult now than ever to determine where someone is from as soon as they open their mouth. Nowadays when you hear a very strong accent it is usually the older generation who are holding on to their pride when they speak but soon i feel to many accents will mix and the UK will eventually start sounding similar altogether as people are not as bothered on keeping a designated accent and are repeatedly moving areas.
Tuesday, 8 December 2015
Tuesday, 1 December 2015
Giles 1970's matched guise technique research 01/12/15
Giles matched-guise technique
The Matched-Guise Test is a sociolinguistic experimental technique used to determine the true feelings of
an individual or community towards a specific language, dialect, or accent.
The experimental
procedure revolves around a variety of different people who acted as judges
listening to different accents and regional dialects and evaluating their
personal qualities solely based on their voices. The topic they talked about
was capital punishment and the arguments were completely identical and the
judges replied with how influential the different accents made their arguments and
ranked each of them.
Oddly during the
experiment the different accents were done by one person and the judges did not
know that it was only one but a range of different people from various areas.
The test was done without seeing the person which meant the only difference was
the speech but the tone and pitch would sound the same. This meant there was
nothing affecting the results and the way of speaking would be exactly the same
and the accent was the only thing being focused on.
Findings
Those
who heard RP were most impressed, those who heard Birmingham were least impressed.
Other findings-those
who heard regional accents were more likely to have changed their minds after
the presentation.
Limitation
One
limitation was that the judges may find out that there was only one person
performing the various accents which could lead them to having different
accents and make the results less reliable.
The
information found also matches what people still think now. This is found in a
recent 2014 survey which showed the people of the UK thought the Brummie accent
was the least attractive and scored -53
on the survey which shows there is little difference in what Giles found to
what people still think today.
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