Accents, and their values, as we hear them

This week’s reading demonstrate the various factors that go into the process of a listener listening to a speaker and processing information from this interaction. Several subconscious inferences are made based on gender, diction and accent – even when we may not necessarily want them to be made! 

In the Sumner and King reading, it is conveyed how the biases people may subconsciously have affect what listeners expect from a speaker and how listeners interpret what they have heard. The connection between voice cues and word interpretation and recognition was emphasized through the example of the influence of gender: hearing a man in an authoritative setting, like a board-room or conference for example, seems “correct” to listeners, who do not doubt the authority of the man. However, when listeners are exposed to a woman’s voice in the same setting, they are less sure of the woman’s authority, may be more taken aback by what she has to say, and might even consciously rank the woman as less trustworthy, as discussed in class. This clear bias is perhaps a result of the outdated stereotype of men as superior and more powerful than women, that unfortunately still exists in some societies and industries.

Furthermore, in “The Social Weight of Spoken Words”, Sumner explores how the social information conveyed by voices trigger social representations, possibly even before we are able to understand what is being spoken to us; this leads to social weighting, as different social representations mean different things to us, in today’s world of social biases. In fact, we pay attention to some social representations more than others – similarly, we listen to some accents and are able to “more easily comprehend” them (even though both accents may actually be equally easy to understand, but we choose to understand the seemingly more pleasant sounding one) over others. The idea that we decide what is “easier” (not actually easier) to understand is conveyed in the Sumner and Kataoka reading. The data found concluded that listeners recognize speech equivalently despite different accents and the varying levels of familiarity the listener has with these accents.

These articles really led me to greatly introspect on a sociolinguistic aspect I’ve grown up with for most of life without realizing. In Delhi, India, a place where I spent a large amount of my childhood, there is a distinct divide between the rich society and the middle-class; on the highways, one will see a rush of Bentleys, Porsches, etc. amongst millions of motorcycles. But, after having read these papers, I find it interesting how there is a stark difference between the accents of these societies: the higher Indian class assumes a more “Britindian” accent with subtleties adopted from the British accent in attempt to sound more “proper”. The superiority of the British accent might be a result of the British colonizing India many years ago, but it is interesting to see how it still plays out in society even today, years after independence.