Activity two

Accents and dialect:
Accent relates only to pronunciation and intonation as opposed to the grammar or vocabulary. Accents act as identifiers for social and regional origins for example, someone from central London will pronounce words differently from those from Newcastle. Additionally, foreign accented speech is negatively evaluated by native speakers of a language. This is because the native speaker believe that the way they talk is the “right” way to talk. There is no right or wrong way to speak in terms off accent, only in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
James Neuliep and Kendall Speten-Hansen Are two men who focused their works on ethnolect, the way in which people from different ethnicities speak. They performed an experiment on 93 men and women to see if there was a correlation between non-native and native speakers, their studies show that the correlation was negative.

Language and age:

With age, language has developed but with this development has introduced the use of non-frequency features such as fillers. These mainly occur during interviews and when questions are asked, they are used to mimic the thought process of an answer. Examples of filler are “um, err, like.” Studies of James Pennebaker showed that women tend to use the filler of “like” most often. However the studies showed that it wasn’t necessarily linked to gender, but to age instead. Older people, typically women, tend to use fillers more often or elongated fillers which conveys an extended thought process.

Language and power:
To exert power through language, most people go to offending others in order to convey power over an individual or group. Most language that is used tends to be taboo language. One researcher Adam Croon categorized powerful language into three groups. Descriptive, expressive and slurring. The example he gave is that if someone were to be named X and we were to describe them, the speaker would typically say “ X is African-English”- this shows no offence but is telling you what they are. For expressive, the speaker could describe “X is a prick”- an opinionated view, which may not been seen by others. However, “X is a nigger”. This is classed as slurring as it alienates and deeply offends the individual in terms of their race.
Nevertheless, some of these racial slurs have adopted a new positive connotation within the race in which it concerns.

London Multicultural language

London English has a new pronoun. Young people living in multicultural areas of the inner city use ”man” as an alternative to I.
Jenny Chesire researched the use of past BE terms (was/were).
1. Variable use of was with all subjects in positive contexts (e.g. I was but also we was, you was) and wasn’t with all subjects in negative contexts (e.g. I wasn’t but also they wasn’t, you wasn’t)

2. Variable use of was with all subjects in positive contexts (e.g. I was but also we was, you was) but weren’t with all subjects in negative contexts (e.g. we weren’t but also I weren’t, she/he weren’t)

The researchers found that adolescents in outer London (the borough of Havering) conformed to the expected non-standard British was/weren’t pattern but in inner London (the borough of Hackney) they found that the use of was in positive contexts was increasing but that there was competition between the two non-standard negative forms of was and wasn’t.