Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T01:18:33.432Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

26 - Language attitudes to speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Dennis R. Preston
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Edward Finegan
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
John R. Rickford
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Get access

Summary

Editors' introduction

Some people recognize they speak with an accent, but many others believe their speech carries no accent. The speech of other groups may be accented, but the speech of our own friends and neighbors we tend to perceive as accentless. To a great extent, accents mark the speech of others, of outsiders to our own group, but not of “us.” From the perspective of outsiders, of course, it is not their speech but ours that carries the accent! Accents are salient triggers in our judgments of people. We favor and disfavor people – like and dislike them – partly because of the way they speak. In this chapter, Dennis Preston recounts his investigation of language attitudes among college students in the Midwest and William Labov's earlier investigation in New York City.

Respondents college students in Michigan identified fourteen dialect areas of the USA, the most important being the South, the North, the Northeast, and the Southwest. In characterizing these dialects, respondents college students used polar terms like slow or fast, polite or rude, smart or dumb, good or bad, and educated or uneducated. As in earlier investigations, these judgments about language cluster into a set related to standardness and another set related to friendliness. The respondents gave high marks to their own Northern dialect on the characteristics related to “standardness,” but they rated the Southern accent more “friendly.” Preston interprets this as a group dividing its “symbolic linguistic capital,” apportioning a significant amount to their own dialect for one set of characteristics (in the case of the Michiganders, for standardness) but not for the other (friendliness).

Type
Chapter
Information
Language in the USA
Themes for the Twenty-first Century
, pp. 480 - 492
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×