Transcript Mobility, contact and an accent norm: the case of Recieved

Mobility, contact and an
accent norm: the case of
Received Pronunciation
Anne Fabricius
Roskilde University
April 2004
Structure of the paper
First part:
a renewed sociolinguistics of RP
a renewed social class analysis
Second part:
changing forms of native RP
changing norms of construct RP
A renewed sociolinguistics
Construct RP (norms) versus native RP
(forms)
the systematic ambiguity?
RP the domain of phoneticians? Not a
vernacular?
RP speakers not suitable as subjects?
BUT Forms and norms change at different
speeds; need to separate cRP and nRP
One example of norms:
“that’s the thing, it is, singing in a choir is a very standardising
thing and and in the case of X (college) it’s standardising to
some vague notion of RP of fifty years ago I think, which is no
doubt what our world service listeners want to hear, who knows
(Male speaker recorded in Cambridge in 1997)
J. Milroy 2001
Received pronunciation: who ”receives” it
and how long will it be ”received”
phonetic forms still exist
Social situation no longer the same as RP’s
’heyday’
RP still exists but does not exist: a paradox
Need two separate entities
Do social elites
persist in the UK?
Cultural distinctions and nuances remain legion.
Accents, houses, cars, schools, sports, food, fashion,
drink, smoking, supermarkets, soap operas, holiday
destinations, even training shoes: virtually everything
in life is graded with subtle or unsubtle class tags
attached…And underpinning these distinctions are
fundamental differences in upbringing, education and
occupations.
(Adonis and Pollard 1997:10)
The classless society…
a clever ruse to discredit the notion of class divisions without
actually denying their existence… The classless society is
therefore not a society without classes, but … a meritocratic
society providing means for people to advance by ability
regardless of class origins.
(Adonis and Pollard 1997:14-15)
Educational segregation in the independent sector in UK from
pre-school age…
Admissions to Cambridge
Year of Entry
2003
State School
(%)
1,643 (55)
Independent
school (%)
1,360 (45)
2002
1,672 (56)
1,340 (44)
2001
1,458 (53)
1,336 (47)
2000
1,458 (52)
1,336 (48)
1999
1,461 (53)
1,320 (47)
Savage 2000:
Class Analysis and Social transformation
Economic inequality continues to segregate
through education, plus
Class cultures have been transformed; loss of
working class independence
New middle class modes of individualization
come to the fore
Horizontal versus vertical dimension emphasized,
discourse of career
the classless society/ the classless accent
Is RP regionalising?:
T-glottalling localised
Consonant
:
London + Home Counties
+ Rest
Pause:
London + Home Counties
Rest
Vowel:
London
Rest
Home Counties
Construct RP at the micro-level 1
I: um did your mother and father ever
talk about um the way that you spoke
as a child
R: yes… not so much me as the other
two [younger siblings] cause the other
two used to glottally stop all the time so
they’d go ’wha’’[wQ?] and my mother’d
go ’what’ [wQt] like this
Construct RP at the micro-level 2
R: there’s sort of a slight backlash going
on at the moment, my mother says ’yer’
she says he’s twenty-three years [j3:z]
old and it’s like "No, mother, ’year’" [jI]
I: so you’re correcting her
R: trying to sort of slightly bring this
back down to not quite so much like
50’s BBC television presenters (…)
Attitudes to RP
Dialect in discourse attitude study
York 2002
3 secondary schools
Samples male/female, RP/regional,
qualitative and quantitative data
Results: female RP speaker judged more
positively than male RP speaker
Conclusions
Fruitful to split RP into native and construct
RP
Looking at a social group’s changing accent
forms via language variation and change
paradigm
And changing norms expressed in conscious
and near-conscious attitudes
What constitutes an accent norm?
Appendix 1: samples
Male RP
Male regional
Female RP
Female regional
Results of Keyword analysis
H
H
E
E
T
T
N
N
1
1
0
2
2
3
1
2
3
2
4
5
2
3
2
4
6
1
3
8
9
5
6
14
14
5
2
4
5
8
16
17
8
8
16
11
5
0
3
8
19
7
6
3
5
6
31
31
9
14
25
31
22
25
7
18
17
2
0
21
19
6
12
8
32
26
55
38
19
16
39
42
Tot
99
99
99
99
99
99
99
101
Keyword Categories
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
nervous and not very confident
positive, confident and independent
boring and quiet
interesting, outgoing, chatty, bubbly, straightforward
average achiever, not very intelligent
intelligent, well-educated, well-spoken, ambitious
posh, snobby, spoilt
friendly, relaxed, trustworthy, pleasant