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SUMMARY:How to sound intelligent: The sociophonetics of non-native speaker
  accents of English - Bettina Beinhoff\, RCEAL
DTSTART:20091103T160000Z
DTEND:20091103T173000Z
UID:TALK20593@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Chris Cummins
DESCRIPTION:Whenever we hear a person speak with a particular accent we ma
 ke assumptions on his/her regional and social background.  This happens be
 cause language in general and accents in particular are considered to be r
 eliable markers of group-membership and thus of a person's social identity
 .\n\nIn this presentation\, I will explain the connection between accents 
 and identity as specified in the Social Identity Theory (SIT).  SIT is fir
 mly established for native speakers (NS) of a language while research on n
 on-native speaker (NNS) accents occurred only fairly recently.\n\nFurtherm
 ore\, I will focus on identity construction through NNS accents of English
 .  English is the global lingua franca and as such it is increasingly used
  for communication among NNS of English who outnumber NS of English by far
 .  In this lingua franca context\, NNS of English need to establish their 
 identity through the medium of their L2.  Additionally\, most NNS speak En
 glish with a 'foreign' accent which causes certain attitudes in speakers a
 s well as listeners and can have profound social consequences.\n\nThe stud
 y presented in this colloquium looks at NNS attitudes towards ingroup and 
 outgroup accents of English\, with particular interest in the solidarity d
 imension (i.e. how much a person identifies with an accent) and status dim
 ension (i.e. how much prestige is assigned to an accent).  A further aim i
 s to find out whether variation in specific sounds - especially consonants
  - directly influences the perception of NNS accents of English and makes 
 them sound more 'friendly' or 'intelligent'.  The results will help us to 
 discover whether there are links between certain attitudes and phonetic de
 tail and thus to understand the impact of the phonetics/phonology and soci
 olinguistics interface in communications in English as a lingua franca.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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