11.2636, Sum: Attitudes Towards Southern American English

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-2636. Tue Dec 5 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.2636, Sum: Attitudes Towards Southern American English

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1)
Date:  Mon, 04 Dec 2000 14:14:46
From:  "Barbara Soukup" <b_soukup at hotmail.com>
Subject:  Re: Language attitudes towards Southern AE

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 04 Dec 2000 14:14:46
From:  "Barbara Soukup" <b_soukup at hotmail.com>
Subject:  Re: Language attitudes towards Southern AE

Dear linguists,
About two years ago I sent out an enquiry for material about language
attitudes towards Southern American English, as I was working on my MA
thesis based on a field study with the same topic. I got many helpful
contributions on the subject; and back then some people also indicated  that
they would like to hear about the outcome of my study. As it is now
finished, I just wanted to give a little summary here for those still
interested. For the record: What I did was an adapted matched guise test
with a population of some three hundred U.S. undergraduate students from New
England and Tennessee. The students were asked to evaluate four speaker
samples (two with a Southern, two with a 'neutral' accent, with male and
female sample respectively) on semantic differential scales. The setting
chosen for the study was a job interview situation in sales.
As it turned out, the data strongly confirmed that a Southern accent is a
first strike against any job applicant. In the statistical evaluation, I
filtered out three factors for the analysis - 'competence' (intelligence,
education, etc), 'personal integrity' (honesty, politeness..) and 'social
attractiveness' (friendliness, sense of humor..). The Southerners
distinctively lost out on 'competence', which the informants ultimately
deemed most important for job performance. 'Personal integrity' scores were
distributed more evenly, with only the Southern male speaker consistently
coming in last. 'Social attractiveness' scores were, interestingly enough,
led by the Southern female, but this did not endorse her scores for job
performance at all.
Throughout, a sort of 'country boying' phenomenon could be recorded for the
Southern female (i.e. some comments on her special 'charm'). For the
Southern male, no 'covert prestige' phenomenon whatsoever was found in the
Southern informant sample, just as in general the Tennessee students were
quite relentless with the Southern 'job applicants', sometimes giving even
lower scores than the New England students.
In short, then, language attitudes towards Southern American English were
rather negative throughout the tested sample. Positive associations with
Southern speech could not compensate for the many negative impressions
called up. A Southern accent was generally perceived as low-status and
non-standard by the students, though they conceded that it might 'work'
within the South itself.
For those who would like to read the results in more detail, I have posted
an abstract of my original MA thesis on the internet under
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9255719/Abstract.htm
Thanks again for the contributions from Linguistlist!
Barbara Soukup from the University of Vienna, Austria.


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