2016 Participants
Caitlin Halfacre
This project is an empirical investigation into perceptions of accents and social class. I have made an observation since studying in Newcastle that many people from the northern parts of England describe all southern accents as sounding “posh”. The hypothesis is that Northern speakers of English are more likely to incorrectly classify a speaker as upper class if the accent is Southern. The North/South border was drawn based on accent features according to Upton & Widdowson (2006). The primary data collection method was an online survey which plays speech recordings and asks for a judgement of social class. The survey was taken by both southerners and northerners to allow for comparative analysis. The recordings are of 13 female speakers under 30 years old and include words which have regional variation. (e.g. foot-strut, gas-glass which rhyme for Northerners but not for Southerners). This hypothesis was tested using quantitative methods including statistical analysis to reliably identify relationships in the data.
Funding source: Newcastle University
Supervisor: Dr Danielle Turton