Language investigation
Introduction
In this investigation I shall be discovering if people feel differently about Received Pronunciation accents and Estuary accents, and whether it makes a difference if the speaker is male or female. I intend to gather opinions on perceived appearance, intelligence levels and personality traits from recorded voices.
Accent: a particular way of pronouncing a language, associated with a country, area, or social class.
OED 1999
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it...It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him.
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912, Preface
Attitudes to accents have always been strong and vastly different. In times gone by it was the upper classes that could afford good education who ran the country. Most land owners, politicians, doctors and 'Gentlemen' spoke English with a received pronunciation acquired, if not at home, in public schooling. For hundreds of years people have tried to sound like those in a higher social class than them - the Cornish language died out due to acceptance of RP English as 'better'.
To a certain extent it is still public schools that perpetuate the RP accent, and many thousands of people have taken elocution lessons in order to train their accents to sound as if they had the privileges of a public school education, and the wealth associated with it. A good example of the language of the upper classes being copied is in the Spanish Language. The modern accent has a strong lisp, in the 1600s a King of Spain spoke with a pronounced lisp, the Spanish people emulated the sound and the accent took hold on the language.
Unlike many other prestige accents, RP has no regional bearings. It is associated with Oxbridge, and with London, but it is not possible to identify the regional origin or social class of an RP accent by sound alone. Because of its place in the schooling system, RP has always been associated with education and intelligence. This has lead to much prejudice against speakers of regional accents, they are seen as less intelligent, less likely to succeed and in some cases, lazy;
There is no doubt that real Cockney despite all its delicious associations of pluck and humour and broadmindedness is a very ugly wrenching of distinguishable sounds into indistinguishable.
Cottle 1975
As well as RP I shall be looking at the Estuary accent - the modern accent of preference. Estuary has grown from Essex and sees to have centred on Milton Keynes so much so that it is now being referred to as the Milton Keynes accent. I shall be defining both accents later but briefly the Estuary accent is virtually everything between RP and Cockney and therefore very hard to define and very wide spread. Modern Television presenters seem to have adopted Estuary tones to add the 'common touch' that their counterparts 30 years ago lacked. Zoë Ball, Davina Macall, Chris Evans and a host of other young Radio and TV stars use the accent almost as a fashion accessory.
The studies of people like Hughes, Trudgill and Lambert have highlighted the social implications of prejudice towards accent. In a study of matched guise in the late 1950s, Lambert carried out investigations into French and English speaking Canadians. When rating the same speaker reading a passage in French and then English, both English and French speaking Canadians found the English speaker more favourable than the French in Physical and mental traits. The French speaker was said to sound more humorous, kind and religious. This brings proof to the theory that the people are prepared to evaluate speakers on ...
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The studies of people like Hughes, Trudgill and Lambert have highlighted the social implications of prejudice towards accent. In a study of matched guise in the late 1950s, Lambert carried out investigations into French and English speaking Canadians. When rating the same speaker reading a passage in French and then English, both English and French speaking Canadians found the English speaker more favourable than the French in Physical and mental traits. The French speaker was said to sound more humorous, kind and religious. This brings proof to the theory that the people are prepared to evaluate speakers on their accent alone.
Howard Giles carried out a similar study using RP and non-standard regional accents in England. RP speakers were rated more highly in terms of intelligence and ambition, though lower in terms of sense of humour and talkativeness.
It is certainly true that as part of our 'language wardrobe', most people tend towards an RP accent in formal situations. As Hughes and Trudgill say in their book 'English Accents and Dialects', 'In what speakers see as a very formal situation they will tend to articulate more slowly and carefully. Individual sounds will be given their full value; none will be omitted.' On an accent/class continuum, represented in their book by the triangle below, they place RP speakers at the top of the social scale with no link to regional origin. At the bottom of the social scale are the richest regional accents. This representation is open to criticism; the poor Eastender who has been taught an RP accent or the self made millionaire from the Yorkshire Dales are obvious exceptions, though rare.
Relationship between class and accent
Peter Trudgill refers to other experiments on the same lines in his book 'Sociolinguistics'. Trudgill claims that RP speakers have been judged as being 'more intelligent and educated, but less friendly and less likeable, than the same speakers using a local accent-speaking guise.' He also points out the implications on social events, where meeting someone for the first time, 'an RP may be perceived, as soon as he starts speaking, as haughty and unfriendly by a non RP speaker, unless and until he is able to demonstrate the contrary. He is, as it were, guilty until proven innocent'. He also points out how in schools, children with non-RP accents may be perceived as less able and given less opportunity to prove otherwise. He goes on to say that women are likely to use more 'correct' language than men. He explains that this is true all over the word and in many different languages. This seems to be because Non Standard English is stereotypically lined with lower class society and therefore violence, crime and general miscreance. This lends a machoism to a strong regional accent - creating what Labov described as a 'covert prestige' in men and generally men only. I feel this is borne out well by the media - evil geniuses are usually well spoken with their 'hard men' being tough but stupid estuary speakers. Women are either well spoken, intelligent and aloof, like a Bond Girl or are bubbly, stupid and promiscuous with estuary accents, as in Barbara Windsor's characters in the Carry on films.
It an also be because, as Trudgill points out, society generally expects more co-operation to the 'acceptable norms' from women. In this case, more standard accent. From these points we can make the assumption that women who speak with a non-RP accent will be considered to display the negative qualities associated with the machoistic regional accent.
Aims
My aim is to discover the answer to the question; how do people respond to RP and Estuary accents, and do they respond differently to men and women with the same accent?
I shall be studying attitudes of the general public towards accents. In doing this I aim to discover what attitudes at accents are.
I am hoping to be able to make a statement about which accent between Received Pronunciation and Estuary is seen as more intelligent and which is friendlier. My hypothesis is that people will find the Estuary accent more friendly but less intelligent than the RP.
Peter Trudgill states; 'Our accent and our speech generally show where we come from and what sort of background we have. We may even give some indication of certain of our ideas and attitudes and all of this information can be used by the people we are speaking with to help them formulate an opinion about us.'
I aim to discover just how much of our 'ideas and attitudes' people do pick up from our speech.
I also believe that the covert prestige is on the rise for Estuary speakers, both male and female, and hope to discover if attitudes really are changing.
Methodology
I shall obtain samples of four female and four male voices. Two of each shall be RP speakers, two shall be estuary speakers. I shall record them reading the text as below.
Accent test
Please recite the alphabet
Please read the following out loud;
I made a cup of tea while it was raining.
It was a terrible state of affairs.
Both of the women bathed in the pool
When I have recorded the voices I shall check that they display the characteristics explained below. Once I am happy that they are either Estuary or RP as I required I shall play all 8 recordings to 20 people of varying ages, social class and gender. I aim to do this by sampling random people at college, my places of work and my parents' places of work. I will ask each of them to rate the speaker's friendliness and intelligence on a scale of 1-5, 1 being the highest. I will also ask them to add any other comments or impressions they have of the speaker. Their age group and gender will also be noted to aid in statistical analysis.
When I have the 20 opinions on my voices I shall begin analysis. I will devise an average rating of friendliness and intelligence. This will give me my preliminary results. I will then take the other comments and try to draw some conclusion about them. If I have time I will then go on to study what effect the age and gender of the judge had on the results.
I chose the alphabet as it gives me an easy to analyse their speech. If the speaker does not use a standard pronunciation I can tell easily and record them as being estuary speakers.
The phrases give me an idea of how the diphthongs work within the language. While pronunciation may not change noticeably within the phonetic alphabet, where they are formed in the mouth will differ, as shown in the diagrams from the Hughes and Trudgill book 'English accents and dialects'.
These diagrams show the way sounds are formed in the mouth, for example in RP, the sound /æ/ is found at the front of the mouth with the lips virtually fully open. In Estuary, this sound is still found at the front of the mouth, but the lips close as it is pronounced. The diagrams are self-explanatory so I will not go into detail about them here.
The phrases give me the opportunity to test the pronunciation of the 'a' sound from 'made', the 'h' as the second sound and the final 'le' in 'while', the final 't' of 'it', the final 'g' of 'raining', the 'ble' of 'terrible', the final 'te' in 'state', the first 'a' in 'affairs', the 'th' in 'both' and 'bathed' and the 'ool' at the end of 'pool'. All these are the sounds that differ the most between RP and Estuary. I have written a description of what I am classifying as Estuary and what I am defining as RP below. RP must have all of the characteristics below but while Estuary should display most of the characteristics, its varied nature means that I am unlikely to get all of the aspects in one speaker.
I will aim to keep the surveying as accurate and fair as I can and obtain a true sample of opinions of accents. Without having a fair and accurate experiment I cannot hope to draw any conclusions.
By giving each person their own form and not allowing them to talk to anyone during the listening, I will prevent the results being influenced by other peoples' opinions. I will have to ensure that I do not let any other factors than accent influence my results - if I do, the piece will be an inaccurate and unreliable picture of attitudes towards accent. I must ensure that the quality of the recording is constant; a poor recording for one of the accents may lead to poor opinion of the accent. If and of my subjects have difficulty in reading the phrases, there may be a difference in the results - those who stumble over words may be thought of as less intelligent than those who have no difficulty reading. To combat this I will allow my subjects to read through the phrases as many times as it takes for them to feel comfortable with it. I have also chosen simple phrases to limit the number of mistakes they should make.
I have chosen to perform the experiment in this way, as I cannot see another way of reaching accurate and concise results. Asking a person's general opinion of voices would be very difficult to compare with other answers, and without having such a large number of participants I cannot guarantee that it is not the voice people are responding to rather than the accent. This method is sadly very time consuming, and that limits the people I can survey. It does however hopefully give me conclusive results that I can be sure are accurate.
Analysis
The individual research sheets are attached, but here I shall give a summary of the results.
Voice Number
Average
Friendliness
Average
Intelligence
Other Comments
: Estuary Male
2
2
Friendly, Happy
2: Estuary Female
3
Giggly, Silly, Stupid
3: RP Female
4
Boring
4: Estuary Female
.5
4
Blonde, Thick
5: RP Male
4
Boring, Posh
6: RP Female
2
2
Posh, Pretty
7: Estuary Male
2
3
Nice, Fun, Dirty
8: RP Male
3
2
Old
Estuary Male
Estuary Female
RP Male
RP Female
Accent Divide
Gender Divide
These results show a clear divide between opinions of Estuary speakers and RP speakers and Men and Women
I would like to be able to collect more sample voices in order to rule out the possibility that the individual voices display characteristics of friendliness or intelligence, and to play the voices to more people, sadly, time and facilities prevent this. If this were possible, I would be able to get a much more accurate view of opinions and make more of a firm conclusion.
