It has been asserted that a common European variety of English is currently emerging. This so-called “European English” is claimed to be the result of convergence among non-native English speakers, and to reflect a gradual abandonment of Inner Circle norms, which are deemed to be increasingly irrelevant to non-native speakers’ communicative needs. Evidence is so far lacking that Europeans judge each other’s proficiency in English by anything other than native-speaker standards — particularly as regards pronunciation. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to establish whether European non-native speakers of English demonstrated convergence when evaluating the pronunciation of fellow Europeans, and in this respect deviated significantly not only from Inner Circle English native speakers but also from non-European judges. To investigate this possibility, a large-scale Internet survey was carried out in which different groups of users of English (native and non-native, European and non-European, N = 373) evaluated the pronunciation features of five European accents of English, by means of global ratings and detailed responses. The observed convergence of native and non-native judges’ responses does not correspond with emerging endonormative pronunciation standards on the European continent. Hence these findings fail to support the claims about an emerging European English variety.
2024. English in Europe: A research bibliography. World Englishes 43:2 ► pp. 346 ff.
Robinson-Jones, Charlie, Joana Duarte & Dymphi van der Hoeven
2024. Students’ attitudes towards accents in English-medium instruction: The role of cosmopolitan and motivation orientations. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 68 ► pp. 101330 ff.
Hendriks, Berna, Frank van Meurs & Nina Usmany
2023. The effects of lecturers’ non-native accent strength in English on intelligibility and attitudinal evaluations by native and non-native English students. Language Teaching Research 27:6 ► pp. 1378 ff.
Knooihuizen, Remco
2023. Dialect Contact. In The Linguistics of the History of English, ► pp. 115 ff.
Hendriks, Berna & Frank van Meurs
2022. Dutch students’ evaluations of EMI and L1MOI lectures: The role of non-native pronunciation. System 108 ► pp. 102849 ff.
Pinget, Anne-France
2021. First language effects on the identification and evaluation of second language speech.
Nederlandse Taalkunde
26:2 ► pp. 171 ff.
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