by Kizzy Dennett, BA graduate in English Language and Linguistics

For my undergraduate dissertation, I investigated attitudes towards Received Pronunciation (a sub-field of sociolinguistics called folk linguistics). The results of my project contribute to sociolinguistic research in dialectology and language, but they also reveal interesting insights into attitudes towards gender. I believe that some of my results are thought-provoking and this post will share some of them with you!

To give you a brief overview of what my project was about and how I gathered these attitudes, I should begin by telling you how I created and distributed the survey online. The respondents were asked to rate the RP accent on attributes on a Likert Scale (a rating system created by Rensis Likert in 1932). They were asked a few open-ended questions too. With a little help from my supervisor getting the survey out there on social media, within a couple of weeks I was surprised to see that I had twenty-five survey responses! After collecting the surveys, I began investigating them, conducting both quantitative and qualitative analyses on the responses. In terms of the scaled numerical responses on the Likert Scale, I calculated the average result from the responses from the male and female respondents and put them into tables and then put the averages into a total averages table, so I could discuss the overall ratings of the speakers’ friendliness, trustworthiness, pleasantness, intelligence and educational background. As far as the responses to the open-ended questions go, I did a qualitative analysis on the responses to the question “what is your first impression of this person?” by grouping the responses into three fields: ‘Social Attractiveness’ (examples of responses for this are serious, friendly and kind), secondly, ‘Competence’ (educated and well-spoken) and finally, ‘Wealth and Status’ (posh and well-off). I also conducted a qualitative analysis to the responses to “what job do you assume this person has?” by simply listing the responses in two columns labelled as responses to the male RP speakers and responses to the female RP speakers. I believe that this particular question led the most interesting responses.

So what did I find?

First of all, the overall findings of my project were that the respondents of my survey believe that RP speakers can be regarded as highly competent, this having association with wealth and upper social class status. However, attitudes towards this accent showed negative reactions and it was perceived lowly in terms of social attractiveness among the twenty-five respondents. Although an interesting finding (as the accent was not particularly rated well despite its once prestigious status), what intrigued me the most was the gender stereotyping that can be found in the responses and the extent to which gender appeared to be a relevant aspect in the study. To list a few instances of this, a few respondents labelled the male speakers as dentists and doctors but the female speakers were labelled (dental) nurses. So, the men were regarded as holding a higher position in the same industry. As well as this, the women were regularly labelled “housewives and “kept women”. What intrigued me the most about the survey responses is how much gender presented itself as a relevant facet in this project and I can say that confidently, because since all of the speakers had the same RP accent, it insinuates that the gender of the speaker was a variable that influenced the results of the survey. Overall, I was surprised to see the extent to which the gender of the speaker played a significant role in influencing the results of the survey and I believe this is a phenomenon that should be investigated further. I will be doing more research into accents, identity and perceptions of accents in the near future, as I have just been accepted to do a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics!