ABSTRACT
Imagine you are sitting at home and the phone rings. You answer it and find yourself talking to a stranger on the other end of the line. What are you thinking as you listen to them?
When you talk to someone, you start to form opinions about them, sometimes solely on the basis of the way they talk (Chambers 2003: 2-11). The last time you rang a service centre to buy something over the phone, or to complain about something, you would have spoken to a complete stranger. And yet, within minutes or even seconds, you probably composed quite a detailed picture of who you were talking to. Were they male, or female? Were they a native speaker of English? Did they have a strong regional dialect, or could you perhaps only say very vaguely where they come from (‘somewhere in Scotland’ or ‘probably the South’)? You might decide that you think they are Asian or a Pacific Islander. You may also have strong ideas about whether they are ‘nice’, ‘friendly’ and ‘competent’, or whether they are ‘rude’, ‘disinterested’ and ‘stupid’.
