Distinguished Szeged Student Papers [antikvár]

Hi' ^alogh Srzsebet Hungarian Students' Language Attitudes towards Regional American English Accent Varieties^ I i;' 'f ; 1. Introduction By the end of the 20''' and the beginning of the 21" century interaction among people has become more and more complex. Indeed, in today's world we interact and communicate with a great number of people day by day, in general personally but in some cases also via other means of communications, most often through the media, the Internet or mobile phones. As these people all have different personalities, in order to form a picture of them we often grasp back to our (pre)conceptions that we have developed on the basis of our interactions with people we know well. Besides, we tend to simplify these conceptions; therefore, most often what we develop of other people is a generally common stereotype rather than an accurate picture (Wells 1982a, 28). In personal, face to face interactions, not only physical appearance but also speech plays a major role in our perception of others. Nevertheless, when we are not able to see the speakers themselves, the only means that may help us to form a picture of them is the way they sound; therefore, the language or dialect other people speak affects to a great extent how we judge them. Indeed, in most cases it is other people's accents that lead us to create a stereotypic^ picture of the speaker. On the basis of their accents, first we attempt to identify where the speakers come from or where they live at present; second, with the help of stereotypes we place them into different categories where we immediately attribute to them characteristics that we associate with the categories in question. This way, even if we cannot see the speakers, for example, when we are talking on the telephone, their speech serves as a ground for forming an attitude towards them, that is, solely on the basis of what we hear, we feel that we can safely judge the others' beauty or handsomeness, or their intelligence or honesty (Wells 1982a, 29). The question might arise whether the above described process works this way regardless of what accent we hear. In the last few decades, language attitude research has proved that we are able to form our attitudes on the basis of other people's accent when it is part of our native language. An example for this is provided by Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998,34), who claim that American people form attitudes towards other Americans on the basis of their accent. In other words: When listeners hear a Southern accent, they identify the speaker as being from a Southern dialect region and they may automatically assign (perhaps unconsciously) a set of character traits to the speaker. These traits may range from such positive qualities as warmth and hospitality to such negative attitudes as poverty and lack of intelligence. However, it is very well possible that when non-native (non-American and non-English speaker) listeners hear the same Southern accent, they do not attribute any characteristics to the speakers. Unfortunately, the amoimt of research about non-native speakers' language attitudes towards 7 l' . ' A reanalyzed version of this paper appeared in Ewa Waniek-Klimczak (ed.) Issues in Accents of English. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2008: 150-168. I '