Eckert and Cheshire

 

In every school you will find distinct groups, Penelope Eckert identified two diverse groups in an American high school – the jocks and the burnouts. The jock were very stimulated through school activities and very eager to participate. The burnouts refused to take part in school activities and were stubborn and rebellious. In the UK, you don’t really find specific social groups like Eckert has stated in America, they are mainly just ‘friendship groups’. However, people tend to become friends through sports for example, if they’re on the same team they will tend to form a friendship, due to the team spending time together training they will develop the same language choices, this may be how they choose to speak later on in life all because of spending time with these interest groups. In Cheshire’s study she carried out an experiment involving two groups of girls, one having a positive attitude to crime and weapons however group 2 didn’t agree with any of these features and activities. She conducted a long term participant observation with these groups trying to distinguish their different language variations. These girls who had a negative attitude towards school and participated in criminal activities didn’t put any effort in how they spoke and their grammar. Yet the other group of girls were well spoken and they always had a positive attitude. This could link with friendship groups and their attitudes towards school life, you would typically see the groups who don’t really care about school to not put much effort into grammar and not to focus on language. Oppose to the students who are willing to work would concentrate on the way they spoke and would want to have good grammar and language. Overall, in general students will tend to use more colloquial and taboo language when in their friendship groups as these are the people they feel most comfortable around against being around family as would have to be more polite and formal.

 

 

 

 

 

Research task

Accents

• Accents relate only to pronunciation and intonation rather than grammar or vocabulary.
• Listeners, naturally pick up these cues about people’s ethnic, socioeconomic and geographical background.
• Research has shown that listeners can also make judgements on others’ intelligence, warmth and even height just by listening to recorded accented speech.
• Foreign accented speech is negatively evaluated by native speakers of a language.
• People who view their own group or culture as the centre of everything, and who scale and rate all other groups with reference to it, can be said to be ethnocentric.

 

 

Accents and Dialect

Accents and dialect

 

A dialect: is a specific variety of English that differs from other varieties in three specific ways: lexis, grammar and phonology. English dialects may be different from each other, but all speakers within the English-speaking world can still generally understand them.

Accent: refers only to differences in the sound patterns of a specific dialect.

 

  Examples – Geordie vs English

Geordie	English
How man mutha man.	Please mother don't embarrass me.
Ye knaa what ah mean leik.	Do you know what I mean?
Eeeh man, ahm gannin te the booza.	OK, I have had enough, I am going to the bar.
Whees i' the netty?	Who's in the lavatory?
Gan canny or we'll dunsh summick.	Be careful or we will crash into something.

                                                                                                                                    

 

Examples of scouse terms

• Skint - To have no money
• Togger - A football match
• Offey - Off licence
• Mogger (ride on a bike)
• Meff - Trampish looking fellow
• Gowed instead of "Go ahead"
• Kecks – Trousers
• Kidda/Kidder - Good friend
• Divvy - A stupid or silly person
• Baltic - Extremely cold weather

conversation analysis 

Millie: (laughs)
Daisy: (laughs)
Millie: its just gonna be laughs laughs (laughs) (.) hello daisy how are you today
Daisy: (laughs)
Millie: ermm (.) you had a fine day today
Daisy: it was mighty fine (.) mighty fine (laughs) who says that
Millie: (laughs)
Daisy: hows yours
Millie: great (.) just waitin to get a lift (.) but so are you so (.)
Daisy: (laughs) you idiot
























This conversation consists of two people - Millie and Daisy. We can clearly see that Millie is dominating because she started the conversation in the first place by engaging with Daisy, also Millie tends to be the one attempting to begin conversation by using interrogatives to interact with Daisy. The place which this conversation occurred was in a calm and comfortable environment so the speakers were able to relax and not care due to the strong relationship they hold. The speakers use informal Lexis to communicate with each other, showing they have a relaxed relationship towards the other speaker, demonstrating they would most likely be close friends as they tend to laugh a lot which highlights how they're comfortable with each other. The informality exhibits the type of environment they are situated in, due to the casual atmosphere we know they are not in a job setting for example, more a gossip between friends. To add, the hefty amount of - (laughs) used throughout the conversation indicates the low register of the conversation. Throughout the chat we see two utterances between different speakers which have a natural link which complete the idea together - this is called: adjacency pair, we also see - turn-taking in the conversation so they share the speaking roles. The conversation also contains two elision sentences, involving the words: 'gonna', and 'waitin'. Elisions are the slurring together of sounds or syllables to save time, this is also less formal which also helps demonstrate the informality perceived through the informal Lexis used. Another example of showing informality is that the conversation uses hiatus and non-fluency features as well which are devices that interrupt the flow of talk, we see this through the use of 'ermmm' used in the conversation. This would have been used so the speaker was able to think about what she was going to say before blurting out anything random also because the speakers were not prepared so they didn't know what to say, The use of the symbol - (.), to demonstrate a brief pause also helps to show the thought process Millie went through to decide on a question to ask.