Country DJ Too Southern for Station

[Mai Kuha]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mai Kuha" <mkuha at BSU.EDU>
> Subject: Country DJ Too Southern for Station
>> Click on the URL below for the rest of this story:
>> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,66422,00.html

On 10/23/02 8:24 PM, Anne Gilbert wrote:

> This is interesting.  But it's hardly surprising.  "Southern" accents tend
> to be thought of by a lot of people as "sounding stupid and uneducated".
> (...) And in radio and on TV, *any* "regional"
> accent tends to be frowned upon. (...)
> Anne G

True. I posted the URL not so much as the shock of the day but because it's
interesting to see what kinds of comments about language variation make it
into the media.  Still, matched guise experiments on Southern speech and on
stigmatized language varieties in general show that, while these varieties
earn their speakers low ratings on status characteristics such as
intelligence, at the same time they correlate with positive impressions on
so-called solidarity characteristics, such as friendliness and
trustworthiness, at least when the speakers rated are men. In the context of
the job of a DJ for a country station, we might have expected the solidarity
concerns to outweigh status concerns, so actually this case was at least
mildly surprising.

-Mai