ABSTRACT
She pauses, then levels a steely look at him: ‘It means I listen to the way people talk and I judge them on it.’
In general, the judgements sociolinguists make about other people’s speech are pretty innocuous. Some sociolinguists know a lot about what features typify the accents or dialects of speakers from different regions, and these sociolinguists are pretty good at identifying speakers’ origins from the way they speak. When linguists talk about accents, they are referring only to how speakers pronounce words, whereas they use dialect to refer to distinctive features at the level of pronunciation and vocabulary and sentence structure. So, for example, the English used by many Scots would be considered a dialect because it combines recognisable features of pronunciation, e.g., a backed short /a/ sound in words like trap or man, with constructions like This data needs examined . . . (i.e., ‘needs to be examined’) and the use of the preposition outwith (meaning ‘beyond, outside’). Since all of
■ accents
■ dialects
■ variety
■ speech community
■ style-shifting
■ attention to speech
■ audience design
■ triangulation
■ sociolinguistic interviews
■ stratified
■ monotonic
■ trend
■ rapid and anonymous
■ speech community
■ overt prestige
■ covert prestige
■ observer’s paradox
■ participant observation
■ speaker design
Key terms introduced in this chapter:
these features occur even in quite formal styles of speaking, they are quite reliable cues that the speaker comes from or has lived a long time in Scotland.
