Transcript Socio-political factors for the preference of British

Alireza Dehbozorgi
Allameh Tabataba’i University
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It is well known that individuals perceive the
languages and/or varieties which exist in their
environment differently. Hence, the creation of
the perceptual dialectology, as a subfield of folk
linguistics, which itself can be considered a
subpart of sociolinguistics.
The publication of a classic two-volume book
titled Perceptual Dialectology (Preston (1999);
vol. 1) and (Long & Preston 2002; vol. 2)
illustrates the importance that the field of
perceptual dialectology has already gained.
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Preston (1999) consists of 22 articles divided
into three main parts which deal with Dutch
language and its varieties, the Japanese
language and its varieties, and a final part
which consists of a variety of different articles
on different languages.
Part one begins with the origins of modern folk
linguistics by the Dutch dialectologist,
Antonius Weijnen (1946), Little arrows method.
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Chapter 3 of part one discusses the grey areas
in the mutual intelligibility of Dutch and
German speakers at the German-Dutch border.
One can simply infer that Dutch is one of the
most varied languages in the world.
Part 2 deals with the dichotomy objective vs.
subjective dialect boundaries, especially with
regard to Japanese varieties. On the whole, it
consists of 7 chapters.
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Part 3 contains 12 articles each discussing
problems regarding the language attitude
towards English and Japanese (ch. 11), English
varieties in the Great Britain (ch. 12), Japanese
local dialects (chs. 13 and 14), German varieties
in the post-unification area (ch. 15), Parisian
French (ch. 16), Turkish dialects (ch. 17),
American English varieties (chs. 18 and 19),
English varieties in Welsh (ch. 20)
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Chapters 21 and 22 deal with the general
problems of dialect recognition from a
perceptual viewpoint.
What these papers try to convey is that
speakers can, to a more or less extent, perceive
the distinctions and differences between one’s
own language and the others in their
geographical and social environments.
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Volume 2 is more descriptive, consisting of a
wide variety of individual case studies.
Summarily, we can have the following
thematic list:
Ch. 1: deals with the Cuban perceptions of
Spanish varieties.
Ch. 2: investigates the speakers’ aesthetic
evaluation of Dutch.
Ch. 3: illuminates the language situation of the
Mandigo Region in Mali, an African country.
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Ch. 4: discusses the gender-related perceptual
differences of Turkish varieties.
Ch. 5: talks about mental maps using linguistic
-geographic concepts; a classic article
Ch. 6: deals with Montreal inhabitants’
varieties of French.
Ch. 7: is about the acoustic and perceptual
analysis of imitation (as the title exactly
suggests)
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Ch. 8 is about the Californian students’
perception of those US regions in which ‘you
know’ is very common.
Ch. 9: is again about dialect distance perception
of Dutch.
Ch. 10: considers the language perception
situation in the Norwegian city of Bergen.
Ch. 11: takes into account the effects of the
demography, dialect leveling, and social
networks on the perceptual differences of
dialects in old and new towns.
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Ch. 12 provides us with an aesthetic account of
perceptual dialectology of Hungarian.
Ch. 13 deals with levels of linguistic awareness
in the Noirmoutier Island (France)
Ch. 14 discusses the perceptual differences
with respect to the Korean language varieties.
Ch. 15 investigates perceptual dialectology
from an Anglophone perspective
Ch. 16. deals with Madridian perception of
Spanish varieties
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Ch. 17 investigates language attitudes toward a
group of American English varieties (i.e.,
Midwestern)
Ch. 18 is a case study from Southern Italy
concerning the perceptual differences of urban
varieties
Ch. 19 is a perceptual dialectological study of
Swiss French.
Ch. 20: investigates the effect(s) of a phonological
process (i.e., vowel devoicing) on the perceptual
abilities of the Japanese speakers towards the
dialects.
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Almost all of the previous articles mentioned
so far cover one the following comparison
types:
1. Different (geographical and social) varieties
of the same language (e.g. chs. 3-10 of Preston
1999; and chs. 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16,
17, 18, 19) in the same geographical area
(usually a country) judged by informants speak
a different variety of the language and/or
variety in question.
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2. Dialect differences that overlap geographical
boundaries between adjacent countries (e.g.
The German-Dutch dialect perception case near
the border)
3. Dialect differences between varieties which
have a superstratum-substratum relation (such
as Standard Spanish and its Cuban
counterpart)
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But as far as the present author is concerned,
no individual and comprehensive research has
been up to the present date carried out to
consider the perceptual abilities of speakers not
only towards a foreign language, but also
towards the varieties of the foreign language
concerned. In the present article, it has been
tried to overcome these shortcomings by
carrying out a research in the above-mentioned
line.
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In the present paper, the notion of an still
existing RP (Received Pronunciation) and GA
(General American), albeit very controversial,
is taken for granted for scientific purposes. In
other words, the wide varieties of English
spoken in the Great Britain have been idealized
and thus represented by RP, and those varieties
spoken across the United States have also been
represented by GA. As mentioned earlier, these
idealizations are only for special purposes and
only theoretically plausible.
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It is noncontroversial that nowadays pure RP
and pure GA hardly, if ever, exist. For instance,
in the case of England, the influence of Estuary
English (Rosewarne 1984) and Cockney on RP
has been noticeable. The same interactional
relationship holds almost true for the GA, in
which AAVE (African-American Vernacular
English), Boston English, Latino English, etc.
have been very influential on GA. For the
actually existing varieties in US and Canada
see Labov et al. (2006).
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In the present article, the fact is investigated that
Persian speakers of Iran not only have a level of
awareness of English as a foreign language, but
also show different perceptual abilities and biases
towards the two most common varieties in the
world, namely British English, as represented by
RP, and American English, as represented here by
GA. Furthermore, it can be demonstrated that
these different perceptual differences are based not
only on linguistic and aesthetic factors, but that
other factors also play a role in dialectal
perception.
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Edwards (2006: 325-326) proposes three
possible reasons for the preference of one
variety over another:
1. Intrinsic difference
2. Aesthetic difference
3. Social perception
Intrinsic difference is related to the structural
(phonological,
morphological,
semantic,
syntactic, etc.) differences between languages.
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Aesthetic differences concerns the sensory
(mainly auditory) reactions to the external
world. As will be discussed later, intrinsic and
aesthetic abilities can be influenced by social
factors.
Social perception is deeply related to the social
psychology of different societies (whether
micro- or macro-) and their tendency to have a
certain kind of belief and opinion towards a
phenomenon.
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But, having considered all of the abovementioned three factors, one question is still
being unanswered. Do these factors act
independently without respect to the sociopolitical conditions and events that have
occurred in the history of a nation? This can be
considered as the second research question of
the paper. The first one, as mentioned before,
can be paraphrased as the following:
1. Do Persian speakers inhabiting Iran have
different perceptual abilities and biases towards RP
and GA?
The second question can also be paraphrased in
the same way:
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2. Do socio-political factors influence the judgments
about the intrinsic, aesthetic, and social factors?
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The research has been carried out in four major Iranian
cities, namely, Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, and Shiraz.
The informants have been divided according to their
awareness of the English language and its varieties into two
groups:
1. Those with common awareness (i.e., the highest level of
informant’s awareness of a linguistic topic; see Preston
1996a) which consist mainly of language learners and
university students (not necessarily studying English
language and related fields, but which may have passed
some related credits in English). These group of informants
were tested beforehand to see if they were sufficiently
proficient to distinguish between RP and GA, and if they
passed the test , they were requested to fill out
questionnaires and participate in some oral interviews.
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2. The second group of informants had mainly
suggestible awareness (see Preston 1996a) of
linguistic topics in question, and mainly
consisted of commoners, with no noticeable
knowledge or official training in English. They
were only requested to take part in the oral
interview.
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The main aim of the interviews is to compare
the results of the two group of informants and
to see whether there are any correlations of the
two judgments of the two groups?
A number of 40 informants are selected from
each town (altogether 160), half of which
belonged to each group.
The questionnaires and oral interviews
involved asking the informants to specify the
features that seem characteristic of that variety.
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In written questionnaires, four phonetic
features distinguishing RP and GA were
considered:
- rhoticity
- nasality
- creaky voice
- context-dependent vowel lengthening
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In oral interviews, the informants were asked
to listen to parts of a recorded speech in one of
the varieties and then to specify its
characteristic features.
After doing the first phase, the next step would
be to reveal the real answers (i.e., names of the
varieties in question).
Before revealing the name of the variety, the
results of the two groups largely converged
(154/160), in that:
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- They considered RP to be more nasal, nonrhotic, creakier, and by its less use vowel
lengthening in words such as ‘possible’. The
reverse was held to be true for GA.
As they were informed of the true name of the
variety, the results changed way a bit:
The second group of informants (i.e., those
with little awareness of the English language),
preferred American with a high majority
(68/80) for solely sociopolitical reasons.
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The first group (i.e., the one with more
linguistic awareness of English), remarked that
they preferred British English over American
English.
Now the question remains that what are the
sociopolitical factors that affect the informants’
first judgements?
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- Britain and the United States have been actively
engaged in Iran both economically and militarily.
The British Petroleum had been in the Southern
parts of Iran, mainly operating refineries.
The British Council also had an active role in
foreign language education in Iran.
In the 1970s, the US considered Iran an ally and
friend (Iran was part of an alliance called CENTO,
a NATO subsidiary). Thus, Iran was financially,
militarily, and educationally (by student exchange
programs) assisted by the US.
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The British have always (somehow mistakenly)
been taken as cunning, and interfering by the
common Iranians.
The US financial assistance, together with the
high price of oil made Iran a powerful country,
not only in the region, but in the world.
Iranians travelling to US in the 1970s liked the
friendliness of the Americans as opposed to the
relatively conservative behavior of the British.
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The noticeable result is that almost all of the
second group associated nasality, etc. with
being posh, colonialism, bias. But for the first
group (70/80), this is quite the reverse.
This is shows that affection towards UK and, in
general has increased within the past two
decades. Especially, the younger generation’s
attitude illustrates this point.
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This effect has actually revealed itself after the
Islamic Revolution, after which the diplomatic
relations were officially cut.
As evidence, we can now also observe that
teaching RP in language institutes is becoming
more common in Iran.
In fact, as a subsidiary part of the survey, I also
asked my informants whether the teaching of
RP instead of GA has advantages or
disadvantages, 87.5% (70/80) of the first group
had positive opinions about this.
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Aesthetic, intrinsic (linguistic), and sociopolitical factors can be considered as different
components of a complex system (Simon 1969).
In other words, these factors have themselves
several sub-components, e.g., social component
has as its members the features [harshness],
[arrogance], etc. Intrinsic differences may
include
[rhoticity],
[nasality],
[vowel
lengthening].
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As language other social conventions are
considered as complex systems, they must
have a hierarchical structure towards each
other. In other words, they must be involved
with the interaction of their subcomponents as
well as with those of other (higher or lower)
counterparts.
In a hierarchical system, the higher we go, the
stronger the components become, and less
resistant
to
manipulations
by
lower
components.
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The position of factor components are different in
different languages (and thus, in different
societies). For instance, in more literate societies,
the linguistic component possesses the highest
position in the hierarchy, with the aesthetic and
social factors laying below it. Here, the linguistic
factors, thanks to their higher position, have
command over the other factors and resist any
influence from other ones. This can be clearly
illustrated by the relatively pure linguistic
judgments of speakers in more literate societies on
different languages.
Linguistic
Vowel lengthening
nasality
Sociopolitical
arrogance
colonialistic
Aesthetic
beauty
ugliness
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The situation is sometimes changed the change
of position in the hierarchy. Thus, in less
literate societies, sociopolitical factors are
placed higher in the hierarchy, and affect the
linguistic and aesthetic factors in speakers’
judgments. That can be observed in group 2
informants (i.e. the older generation) in this
research. But the judgments of group 1 (i.e. the
younger generation) suggests that Iran is in a
process of gradual change in the hierarchical
structures mentioned.
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This model can also be illustrated through (the
originally Fodorian) concept of ‘module’.
Different modules also can consist of
subsections, and can interact with each other.
Two of the features that Fodor (1983)
considered necessary for a module to have are
‘information encapsulation’, i.e. that other
modules cannot interfere in the internal
processing of a module, and ‘domain-specificity’,
which states that each module can only store
and/or process certain inputs.
Aesthetic
Sociopolitical
Linguistic
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The balance relationship between modules can
change by the decrease in their domainspecificity and information encapsulation. The
weaker these features in a module, the more it
can be penetrated and manipulated by other
modules. Let’s call this event ‘modular leakage’.
Modules can also take a hierarchical formation.
Let’s call this model the ‘dynamic hierarchicalmodular’ model.
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Edwards J. Language Attitudes. In Brown K.
(ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and
Linguistics (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier,
2006. vol.6. P. 325-326.
Labov W., Ash S., Boberg, C. Atlas of North
American English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter
GmbH & Co. 2006
Long D., Preston D. R. (eds.). Handbook of
Perceptual Dialectology. vol.2. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 2002.
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Preston D. R. (ed.). Handbook of Perceptual
Dialectology.
vol.1.
Amsterdam:
John
Benjamins, 1999.
Rosewarne D. Estuary English, Times
Educational Supplement, 19 September 1984.
Simon, H. A. The Sciences of the Artificial.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1969
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Thank you very much for your attention
and patience.