ABSTRACT
Irrespective of what you say, how you say it is likely to be an important factor in the impression you make upon other people. Various dimensions of speech style have been shown to influence a wide variety of interpersonal judgments (Giles & Powesland, 1975). The perceiver's judgments are frequently based upon unconscious, stereotyped associations to largely unmanaged features of the perceiver's speech style. In Britain, one of the most important dimensions of socially significant intra-language differences is regional and class-related variations in accent. A speaker's accent is a function of both social status and region of origin, as well as a number of other characteristics, such as age and sex. A person having an R.P. accent (received pronunciation), the standard nonregional accent, is seen as being middle class and of higher status than people who have identifiable regional accents. Experimental studies using the matched-guise technique (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, & Fillenbaum, 1960) have demonstrated that many additional stereotyped responses can be elicited by accent cues. For instance, compared with a regionally accented speaker, a speaker with an R.P. accent is reliably seen as more competent but less socially attractive and less trustworthy (Giles, 1971c).
