Accent maintenance - summary

[Claire Bowern]

Many thanks to everyone who responded on- and off-list to my query
about accent maintenance, and sorry for the delay in compiling the
summary.

The phenomenon I was asking about (intentionally retaining L1 accent
features in L2, despite fluency) seems to be extremely common. In
addition to the identity issues I mentioned in the query (that is,
retaining features to signal that one is a foreigner, or from a
particular place), others brought up other sociolinguistic reasons,
for example prestige views of the L1. Wolfgang Dressler also mentioned
a case where someone neutralized front rounded vowels with back vowels
in German, because he didn't want to sound Turkish.

In terms of papers, Maicol Formentelli pointed me in the direction of
work by Jennifer Jenkins:

Jenkins, Jennifer (2007) English as a Lingua Franca: attitude and identity, OUP.
Jenkins, Jennifer (2001) The phonology of English as an international
language, OUP.
Jenkins, Jennifer (2009) ‘(Un)pleasant? (In)correct? (Un)intelligible?
ELF Speakers’ Perceptions of Their Accents’. In Anna Mauranen and
Elina Ranta (eds.) English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 10-36.

Sandro Caruana also mentioned the case of Maltese speakers of English,
where interdentals are pronounced as t and d despite proficiency.

Thanks to the following people for replies.
Rémy Viredaz
Sheila Embleton
Raymond Mougeon
Ruth King
Paolo Ramat
Sandro Caruana
Maicol Formentelli
Roger Wright
Jacqueline Visconti
Jim Gair
Wolfgang Dressler

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Claire Bowern
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
Yale University
370 Temple St
New Haven, CT 06511
North American Dialects survey:
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects/




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Claire Bowern
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
Yale University
370 Temple St
New Haven, CT 06511
North American Dialects survey:
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects/
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