Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia and America

Abstract

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.

Plus Ça Change… Serbian EFL Students' Attitudes Towards Varieties of English

“…Of the two EFL speakers, the one whose accent was more similar to "standard southern English" (although it did show some EFL features) was ranked much more favourably on prestige. The high positive rating of the Australian speaker in the dimension of prestige, although admittedly not expected in our population, also falls in line with the findings of some recent research (Bayard et al 2001;Garrett et al 2005). Echoing numerous previous findings, for instance, Lippi-Green's (1997) or Soukup's (2001), that "Southern accent is considered low-status and non-standard" (Soukup 2001: 67), in our population, too, the lowest prestige was associated with Southern USA speech, although the speakers from Scotland and Northern Ireland were rated relatively negatively in this dimension as well.…”

“…That is why we did not include some traits used in previous research, e.g. "ambitious", "assertive" and "controlling" (Bayard et al 2001). Taking into account the Serbian social and cultural context, we provided longer labels for some traits, e.g.…”

“…In this respect, our results do fall in line with some previous findings (cf. Garrett et al 2005: 212;Bayard et al 2001;Coupland and Bishop 2007), but not completely. Namely, it is often pointed out that the varieties ranked high on social prestige tend to be rated rather low on social closeness and attractiveness, and vice versa.…”

“…those pointed out by Milroy and Preston 1999;Bayard et al 2001), we based our choice of the recordings on the following criteria. First, we chose to present only male voices, since in the available archive they showed less variance and comparable voice qualities could be found more easily.…”

The competence and warmth of Thai students’ attitudes towards varieties of English: the effect of gender and perceptions of L1 diversity

“…In particular, it has been demonstrated that speakers of varieties perceived as standard tend to be rated highly in terms of status (traits such as intelligence and education) whereas speakers of varieties perceived as non-standard are generally evaluated more favourably in terms of solidarity (traits such as honesty and friendliness). The distinctions made between perceptions of standard and non-standard forms of spoken English have been demonstrated in a large number of studies in L1 Englishspeaking countries, whether through the presentation of speech samples or involving other sociolinguistic instruments, including: Australia (Bradley and Bradley, 2001); England (McKenzie, in press); New Zealand (Bayard et al, 2001); Republic of Ireland (Edwards, 1977); Scotland (Cheyne, 1970); the USA (Fought, 2002); Wales (Garrett, 2010); and the UK more widely (Coupland and Bishop, 2007).…”