Who can guess his accent?: Dutch listeners’ perception of status, affect, dynamism and employability for British, Dutch and Romanian-accented English speakers.
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2023-02-14
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en
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In a verbal-guise speaker evaluation experiment, 183 non-native listeners with Dutch as their native language were asked for their perceptions on speakers of British, Dutch and Romanian-accented English. The study focused on status, affect, dynamism and employability in a between-subjects questionnaire with six male speakers, two per accent. It was found that Dutch listeners rated the status, affect and employability of British speakers of English higher than both nonnative groups speakers, while dynamism ratings of the British speakers were only higher than those of the Dutch speakers. Dutch and Romanian speakers did not differ significantly on any of the four traits. These results are discussed based on previously found effects in speaker evaluations, such as the native accent effect, vicarious shame and the out-group effect. The current study adds to previous literature on speaker evaluations, Dutch-accented English and evaluations by non-native listeners, and covers fairly new ground in research on Romanian-accented English and its evaluations. As results argue for a stigma against non-native variants of English, raising awareness and acceptance of these variants could result in more equality and less discrimination.
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Faculteit der Letteren