This study describes a series of evaluations of gender pairs of New Zealand English, Australian English, American English and RP-type English English voices by over 400 students in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S.A. Voices were chosen to represent the middle range of each accent, and balanced for paralinguistic features. Twenty-two personality and demographic traits were evaluated by Likert-scale questionnaires. Results indicated that the American female voice was rated most favourably on at least some traits by students of all three nationalities, followed by the American male. For most traits, Australian students generally ranked their own accents in third or fourth place, but New Zealanders put the female NZE voice in the mid-low range of all but solidarityassociated traits. All three groups disliked the NZE male. The RP voices did not receive the higher rankings in power/status variables we expected. The New Zealand evaluations downgrade their own accent vis-a Á-vis the American and to some extent the RP voices. Overall, the American accent seems well on the way to equalling or even replacing RP as the prestige ± or at least preferred ± variety, not only in New Zealand but in Australia and some non-English-speaking nations as well. Preliminary analysis of data from Europe suggests this manifestation of linguistic hegemony as`Pax Americana' seems to be prevalent over more than just the Anglophone nations.As hypothesized, speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents' own accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. . . . These results underline the prevailing status of British RP throughout the Anglophone world and even in a society that possesses economic and political advantages over Britain internationally. (Stewart, Ryan and Giles 1985: 103) ACCENT EVALUATIONS IN AUSTRALASIA AND THE U.S.A.

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This article examines a set of interactions (logs) takenfrom t h e f a n of computer-mediated communicntion known as Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The authors were particularly concerned with the interaction management strategies adopted by the participants in the logs during the opening and closing phases of the interactions to d m l o p interpersonal relationships and communicate socioemotional content, as illustrated by their attempts to initiate and/or close interach'ons with others using the medium. The article compares these strategies and their structure with those proposedfor face-teface (FTF) interactions and proposes an explanatory framework for the interaction management of opening and closing phases on IRC. It is suggested that interaction management in these phases of IRC logs is similar to that in casual group FTF interaction in terms of the generalfinctions of the strategies used, but that the content, structure, and ordering of the strategies are subject to adaptation. n the past 25 years, a great deal of patterning, routine, and convention-based behavior has been found in social interaction,

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was the Internet's first widely popular quasi‐synchronous computer‐mediated communication (CMC) system. While research has consistently demonstrated the interpersonal nature of IRC, and is now turning to more structurally‐oriented topics, it is argued that IRC research now needs to systematically address links between interaction structures, technological mediation and the instantiation and development of interpersonal relationships within a framework that privileges IRC interaction and social explanations. This exploration of the openings of IRC interactions is positioned as a step in that direction. The openings investigated in the study are those that occur directly following user's entries into public IRC channels, termed the newly‐joined users' Channel Entry Phase (CEP). It is found that turn coordination in the CEP is often ambiguous, has the potential to disrupt relationship development, and leads to considerable emphasis on interactive strategies for the clear ordering of opening phases.