Social Impact

A phrase that I first read in Sumner's overview article - and which stuck with me as I read the next two articles - was 'The Social Impact of Words'. Words, of course, are a fundamental mode of social diffusion and carry with them an implicit social impact.

Since coming to the US, I have fairly steadfastly refused to start using American pronunciations, and in doing so, regularly incite questions as to which country precisely has shaped my accent. It's actually a fairly interesting question, and one I think ties in fairly well to the other papers I read this weekend.

Sumner and King's paper discusses how the way we respond to spoken words is contingent on who says them, and as we discussed in class this week, this colours the qualities we ascribe them. I've definitely found this in Singapore and India, where my westernised accent draws surprise and consequently a slight disdain and mistrust. In the US and the UK, my accent stands out as not-quite American or not-quite British and so people are quite easily able to leap the conclusion that I'm international, although it's harder for them to pin down my origin. More generally, I think that Sumner and King's conclusions speak to the unintended social impact our voices and words can carry. It seems to me that even without trying to, our voices can either confirm or deny stereotypes about us.

Sumner and Kataoka offer a conclusion that offers additional perspective to Sumner and King's discussion. They discuss how as we are exposed more to a particular dialect, we grow accustomed to that dialect and gain additional proficiency in understanding it. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a possible explanatory mechanism into one way we respond to spoken works differently based on their speaker, as discussed in Sumner and King. If I listen to someone whose dialect of English is one which I am used to, I am more likely to be able to understand and respond to them favourably than if they use a dialect with which I am unfamiliar. Secondly, it bears some personal relevance. When I first began debating in Singapore, I was very unused to the rapid clip at which debaters from local schools in Singapore spoke and struggled to keep up and understand what they said. However, after months and years spent debating with and against them, I became very familiar with the way they spoke, whilst retaining my own speaking style and accent.

I thought the three papers I read this week were interesting ways of exploring the ways words carry social input. They demonstrated important consequences of this, and ones that I could identify with fairly easily. It might be interesting to investigate whether these holds for more than one dialect at a time, or whether there are tradeoffs involved in gaining competence in a particular dialect.