As Dhoest and Mertens (2013) note, when glocalising a text, dialect and accent are key elements of that form of adaptation. Though they were referring to the Flemish version of Ugly Betty, the glocalised telenovela par excellence, accent can be used and/or recognised even outside of glocalised adaptations.
AbstractThis article analyses the influence of accent on discrimination against immigrants by examining the hypothesis that accent leads to discrimination only in more prejudiced individuals, merely because people speaking with a native accent are perceived to be better qualified than those whose accent is non‐standard. In Study 1 (N = 71), we found that only prejudiced individuals use accent to discriminate against immigrants. In Study 2 (N = 124), we replicated this effect and found that the influence of accent on discrimination is mediated by the perceived quality of the accent. Study 3 (N = 105) replicated the previous results even after controlling for the effect of stereotyping. These results are the first experimental illustration of the hypothesis that accent triggers intergroup discrimination only among prejudiced individuals because they evaluate native accents as being qualitatively better than accents of immigrants, thereby legitimizing ingroup bias.
Work in perceptual dialectology has argued that listeners’ successful identification of accent areas is facilitated by their geographical proximity to a particular region. Montgomery (, ) argues that this proximity effect is mediated by a ‘cultural prominence’ effect, where localities of high cultural salience seem less distant. We explore these claims using an online survey in which listeners were asked to identify the regional origin of speakers of five accents from England's ‘linguistic north’ (Liverpool, Manchester, Crewe, Stoke‐on‐Trent and Macclesfield) from audio clips of four different sentences. We show that the proximity and cultural prominence effects are partially supported, and that the proximity effect is driven by listeners’ likely contact with/experience of the dialect in question. We also show that listeners react differently to different sentences in the same accent. While some sentences are identified correctly very often, others, even for culturally prominent locations with distinctive accents (i.e. Liverpool), are hardly ever correctly identified. We connect this to the geographical distribution of the linguistic features in the clips, and we argue that the presence, absence and range of individual linguistic features should be systematically considered in all perceptual dialectology work which uses audio stimuli.