Linguistic Accommodation and the Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town

Abstract

This study tests the extent of speakers' linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward interpretation of accommodation, and findings are considered in terms of evidence required for such an account. Implications for the notion of salience in explanations of contact-induced language change are also considered, as is the significance of the "interviewer effect" in the compilation of data sets for use in quantitative studies of phonological variation and change.

Variability in L2 English pronunciation examined through the prism of phonetic imitation

“…Similar studies were also carried out by Gregory and Hoyt (1982), Gregory and Webster (1996), Bilous and Krauss (1988), Natale (1975aNatale ( , 1975b) and Welkowitz and colleagues (Welkowitz and Feldstein 1969;Welkowitz and Feldstein 1970;Welkowitz et al 1972). Phonetic convergence in conversational interactions was investigated more recently by Pardo and colleagues (Pardo 2006;Pardo 2010;Pardo et al 2012;Pardo et al 2013), ), Llamas et al (2009 and Lewandowski and colleagues (Lewandowski 2012;Schweitzer and Lewandowski 2012).…”

Book Review: The Social Meaning of Language, Dialect and Accent: International Perspectives on Speech Styles by Giles, H., & Watson, B. M. (Eds.)

“…I had also hoped for a greater awareness of the degree to which sociolinguists are now attempting to answer the questions addressed in this textbook, using slightly different research protocols from those used by the studies cited here. There is now a thriving research specialization within sociolinguistics which considers both speakers' awareness of a variety of linguistic variables, as well as their attitudes toward those who use those other accents, and how speakers negotiate their identities vis-á-vis other groups within their own community: map-tasks (e.g., Preston, 2013), qualitative data collection methods for determining intergroup attitudes (e.g., Carvalho & Beaudrie, 2013;Dubois & Horvath, 1999;Hall-Lew & Yaeger-Dror, in press;Toribio, 2004;Yaeger-Dror & Purnell, 2010), analysis of attitude manipulation in the popular press (Strand, 2012;Wroblewski, 2012), or perception manipulation using photos of the purported speaker (e.g., Hay et al, 2006), as well as heavy reliance on online questionnaires in conjunction with a detailed sociophonetic analysis and manipulation of speaker guise (Campbell-Kibler, 2009;Labov et al, 2011;Llamas, Watt, & Johnson, 2009). The results of such studies would have provided expanded analysis of attitudes in the present chapters, while providing the opportunity to discuss the abundance of recent methodological advances in both fields which permit finer calibration of language attitudes.…”

Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey

“…They also suggest mechanisms for how existing local variation could become accelerated through indirect contact with accent features, albeit through strong psychological and emotional engagement with a television programme and its characters. We suspect that direct contact with English English does not emerge as a factor precisely because this is mediated by ideological and attitudinal factors relating to nationality and non-rhoticity (Llamas et al 2009). …”