Mock Trial

This week’s readings were incredibly fascinating to me as sociolinguistics is a phenomenon I have subconsciously been exposed to at various points in my life. Following from last weeks reading on AAVE, it was fascinating to read about sociolinguistics from a broader perspective and to see how our perceptions of speech directly correlate to our social biases. 

The Sumner article, in particular, caught my attention as I read that listeners will form opinions early into hearing a speaker talk based on the speaker’s voice cues. This is incredibly poignant to me as when I first moved to England from Singapore at the age of 3, I wondered why other children would make fun of me as soon as I spoke. I knew I sounded different to the other children, but I didn’t know why or what this meant. Applying the principles of the reading to my experiences, I can now say that my accent had a different social-weighting to the other children with their British accents. In a sick twist of events I now have a British accent, and experience this phenomenon on the other side. When I meet an American for the first time, they’ll sometimes fawn over the way I speak. However, I have noticed that some accents have more of a “pull” than others. For example, I don’t notice that my friends from India get a similar reception when they meet a new American.

I also started thinking about imitations, and why some accents are “acceptable” to imitate and others are not. For example why is it acceptable to imitate an Australian accent, but considered more offensive to imitate a Chinese accent. This dilemma comes up in Mock Trial (I am currently at a tournament at Berkeley - incredibly relevant!) when I have to decide what accent to use when deciding on a character for my witnesses. There have been times when I have wanted to use a Chinese accent, but my team have felt that this would be offensive.