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You can read a Danish translation of this article here. 

There is a good chance that the word poles (or should I say pøules?) came immediately to mind. The Danish politician Villy Søvndal’s speech at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 became an instant meme because of the way he spoke English: with a (strong?) Danish accent.

People being judged (typically negatively) as a result of the accent they speak is not an uncommon phenomenon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Similar stories are found elsewhere. In 2016 Angela Rayner (UK Shadow Education Secretary) received abusive emails after an appearance on Channel 4 because she spoke with her native Northern British accent. Check The Accentism Project  to read similar stories.

Moving back to Denmark, Danish media have reported how someone’s accent is not the only source of judgements. Danish people with “foreign” names change their names to increase the chances of getting a job or perform better at their telemarketing job.

Surprisingly, not a lot of research has focused on how/when these linguistic attitudes are learned. That is why I decided to research this and write a book about this topic, my PhD project. My focus was on one specific kind of attitudes: accent stereotypes. These are associations between the accent someone uses and judgements about the cognitive skills, personality traits, social status etc. of the people who speak with an accent. For example, people speaking Standard British English are judged as more intelligent and more suitable as lawyers than someone speaking with an urban London accent. In a Danish setting, people speaking the classic Copenhagen accent are considered more intelligent.

My project focused on a number of topics.

• Does linguistic diversity in a child’s environment while growing up shape how or when they develop accent stereotypes?
• Do children develop stereotypes toward L2 accents at an earlier age than toward L1 accents? L1 accents are accents that are the result of first language acquisition. Someone born and raised in Melbourne will likely speak English differently than someone born and raised in Texas. L2 accents are accents that result of second language acquisition. Imagine someone speaking English with a French accent because of being a monolingual French native speaker.
• Is there a relationship between the development of accent stereotypes and the ability to categorize accents?
• Is there a relationship between the development of accent stereotypes and the ability to understand accents?

To answer these questions, I collected data in two English cities: Plymouth (Southwest England) and London. Participants were between the ages of 7 and 11 years old, they came from families with similar socioeconomic status and had similar receptive vocabulary skills, i.e. they had an understanding of comparable numbers of English words. Importantly, children from Plymouth were exposed to less linguistic diversity than children from London (as expected).

The children would listen to recordings of people speaking with accents. These recordings are called stimuli. The stimuli included the accents of Plymouth, London (Multicultural London English, MLE), Standard Southern British English (SSBE), French-accented English and Chinese-accented English. The experimental session included five tasks:

• One to investigate how well children understood different accents.
• One to know whether the children could differentiate and group speakers who had different accents.
• One to delve into how children rate people speaking with different accents (e.g. how smart do you think this person is?).
• A test to (indirectly) measure participants’ linguistic development.
• A survey for to obtain demographic information.

The results can be organized by task. In the first task, it appears that the older children get, the better they become at understanding accents (see Figure 1). This development is similar across cities. The main difference between London and Plymouth is how accents ranked across locations: French-accented English scored better in London.

In the second task, we find greater differences (see Figure 2). Children from Plymouth became better with age at grouping speakers based on their accent. In contrast, London children were equally good at the task regardless of age. Interestingly, younger children from London outperformed younger children from Plymouth. In contrast, the results of older participants did not vary across locations. The age at which Plymouth children “caught up” with their London peers is 9.5 years.

The third task was a so-called verbal-guise task: they hear a voice, and have to rate the person behind the voice, which is of course solely based on their accents. This task provided significant results for two questions: SMART and HARDWORKING (see Figure 3 and 4 respectively). The children judged whether the speakers (whom they could not see) were smart or hard-working on a scale. Their patterns were similar, so they are commented on together.

• In Plymouth, children between the ages of 7 and 9.5 years did not rate speakers differently. From age 9,5, however, they started rating French-accented English, SSBE and Chinese-accented English higher than MLE and the Plymouth accent.
• In London, children already show signs of accent stereotypes at the age of 7 years. Younger participants rated SSBE and the Plymouth accent highest, while the accents older participants rated highest were SSBE and French- and Chinese-accented English.

  

These results allow us to offer answers to the questions above.

1. Exposure to linguistic diversity appears to have an effect when children develop accent stereotypes, since children from London rate accents differently at an earlier age than children from Plymouth.

2. Children from both cities do not appear to develop stereotypes towards L2 accents earlier than to L1 ones.

3. Being able to categorize accents is somehow relevant to be able to have stereotypes towards them. Younger children from London are better at the task than younger children from Plymouth. Furthermore, London children show signs of accent stereotypes at an earlier age. Importantly, the age at which children from Plymouth start showing accent stereotypes is the same age at which their categorization results match those from London children: 9.5 years.

4. There appears to be no relationship between the ability to understand accents and developing stereotypes towards them.

In conclusion, the development of accent stereotypes does not appear to be a one-size-fits-all process. Children learning the same first language in the same country show different developmental trajectories. This highlights the importance of sociocultural and cognitive factors in (socio)linguistic development.

If you want to read more about the topic, you can find the entire dissertation here.

Sergio Rojo is a PhD student at Lund university. He took an M.A. from Aarhus University on General Linguistics where he focused on typological comparisons of syntactic roles before he moved onto developmental sociolinguistics. He has also worked on projects on early symbolic communication and cognition in humans with the staff at Cognitive Science at AU. He defended his doctoral dissertation the 27^th of September in Lund (Sweden).

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