ABSTRACT
There is a robust literature showing that speakers’ voices are potent cues for listeners to socially categorize, stereotype, and form impres-sions of them (e.g., Ko, Judd, & Blair, 2006; Ko, Judd, & Stapel, 2009; Scherer, 1979; Zuckerman & Driver, 1989). In this vein, many of these texts make the point that Latin origins of the word personality referred “to sounding through.” That people have, or rather are attributed as having, a so-called “accent” has been a social issue and concern in everyday parlance, popular culture, and in many professional contexts for a very long time. One of us (HG) has been the recipient of comments, some humorous and other derogatory, about his “accent” on more than a daily basis-and this for 20-plus years. A recent web-search on “reactions to people’s accents,” for instance, triggered well over 4 million hits. The international diversity of these websites is itself intriguing, ranging from how accents can “hold you back” and are unsuitable for classroom teaching, to those offering programs to eliminate them, to those
on YouTube with video-clips of comedians taking others to task for having accents and other speech styles. Tellingly, the victim of a crime was recently reported in an American newspaper as describing her male perpetrator as “5-foot-6 to 5-foot-8, young, white and with no accent” (our italics; Santarelli, 2010, p. A10). In other words, how one speaks and its signifi cant meanings, together with the reactions and decisions they garner is an incontestably signifi cant communicative issue. In this chapter, we overview multidisciplinary research undertaken on social evaluations of languages and speech styles (an area of inquiry called “language attitudes”) over more than 50 years, with a particular focus on and critique of the array of theoretical frameworks that it has attracted more recently. The ultimate aim of this is to propose an integrative heuristic model that can guide future research agendas. Before moving into the language attitudes literature, a brief history of social attitude research is provided to locate language attitudes in this more general terrain.
