Sociolinguistics

In this week’s articles, I found the topic of sociolinguistics to be very fascinating and relatable to everyday life experiences.

I thought that Sumner’s article, “The social weight of spoken words” was the most relatable to me. Growing up with parents who were non-native English speakers, there was definitely a social bias against their speech. People would give my parent’s a hard time due to their heavy Chinese accent, but when a British speaker spoke, people would fall in love with their speech. The discrimination against “unpleasant” sounding accent affects how people comprehend someone’s speech. If it is a more “pleasant” sounding accent like a British accent, people choose to understand it more. This discrimination has been built from society grouping these accents and causing people to stigmatize different accents.

This relates to the King and Sumner article where people have their own interpretations and expectations of what a speaker should be saying based on their identity. For example, the difference between a man and a woman’s voice affects how a listener takes in speech. Usually a male’s voice is more authoritative due to the patriarchy created in the past. So, when a female speaks in an authoritative setting or context, people may be more taken back by what the speaker is saying and question the truthfulness because the speaker is female. If the speaker is a male, there are usually less doubts about what the speaker is saying due to the stigma that male speakers are usually more authoritative.

Lastly, in Sumner and Kataoka’s article, it mentions that GA speakers recognize words uttered by BE speakers. As mentioned before, I believe this is a choice that people make and due to the more pleasant sounding accent British speakers have, GA speakers choose to understand and recall words that are uttered by BE speakers.