- Campbell-Kibler briefly discusses the interaction between content and accent on page 52 when teasing apart alternative explanations for why Jason was perceived as “gay.” The incident she notes is that he is most frequently rated as “gay” when participants heard his recording on his love of shopping. Though, as she notes, his recordings across the board still were rated as “gay” more frequently than any other speaker suggesting that there is more at work here than content. Expanding on this interaction, how can we manipulate the use of content to challenge what stereotypes and social readings listeners take away? If we use a speaker with a southern accent who discusses something typically associated with intelligence (a medical procedure or physics, etc.) how might we expect listeners to perceive them? Would listeners still rank them lower on intelligence or education or would they rank them higher? How much influence does content have over accent and vice versa? Which would we expect to have the greater influence over perceptions?
- On page 44, Campbell-Kibler brings up Lippi-Green’s (1997) theory of the Myth of the Nonaccent. How can we challenge the idea that people exist who are unaccented? Is that part of our responsibility as linguists? How damaging is it to individuals and society at large that some parts of the population are perceived as standard, while the rest are “other?”
- How reliable is our knowledge of accents and thus our deductions of where people come from and the social information we associate with those areas? Certainly people from the South must perceive other Southerners differently than how someone from California might perceive them. Could we ever say that one interpretation of a speaker carries more weight and is a more valuable reading than another?
- How much of the social information attributed to an accent is based on media, that may or may not be a flawed presentation?
Introduction to Sociolinguistics – Fall 2019
LING 76100: Introduction to Sociolinguistics, CUNY Graduate Center
