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Pragmatics of Accents
Edited by Gaëlle Planchenault and Livia Poljak
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 327] 2021
► pp. 19–40

Attitudes to accents

| Université de Genève, Switzerland
This chapter looks at the processes involved in the development of the attitudes to voices. After outlining the main outcomes – and their social issues – of different research traditions related to language regard studies (such as language attitude research, language ideology analysis), it goes on to survey the recent findings that focus on the complexity and the variability of the responses to language varieties. Thereafter, the text discusses to what extent this focus on complexity conforms to the social constructivist turn in social sciences, namely how current research deals with non-essentialist assumptions and non-fixity of meanings. Finally, the chapter critically addresses the agency attributed to social actors in meaning making and examines findings that show the importance of legitimacy issues to the interpretation of attitudes to accents and make explicit the political dimension in the use of language resources as well as in the regard on them.
Keywords: language regard, agency and social structure, context, social determinism and constructionism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The social background of language regard
  • 3.Study of language regard
    • 3.1On the side of social determinism
    • 3.2Context and social determinism
    • 3.3Social constructionism
  • 4.Foreign accent and local accent: An impossible mixture?
    • 4.1Context of the study
    • 4.2Methods
    • 4.3Some results
      • 4.3.1Internet survey
      • 4.3.2Interviews
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.327.01pri
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