Hungarian student’s language attitudes towards regional American English accent varieties

Balogh Erzsébet

2012

06. Bölcsészettudományok

06.02. Nyelvek és irodalom

06.02.06. Nyelvészet

In spite of the fact that attitudes of native speakers of English towards various regional varieties of US English have been investigated thoroughly in the past decades, the number of studies that have been carried out to examine non-native speakers' attitudes towards regional accents is rather limited. This paper intends to fill this gap and, after an overview of language attitude research in general and in this particular context, it examines what attitudes non-native speakers have, in comparison to native speakers, towards specific regional accents of U.S. English. The respondents in the current study were American and Hungarian students from the University of Szeged who, with the help of a modified version of the matched guise technique, listened to tapes of the same passage read by four male native speakers, of whom two were from the southern and two from the general American accent groups. Respondents then judged the speakers along nine character traits; the evaluations were compared and contrasted to each other and to the outcome of previous research in this field. The results confirm the findings of previous language attitude studies, whereby the current study first indicates that Hungarian students are able to perceive differences in regional accents of U.S. English; second, it points out that both the actual values and the patterns of the judgments of the Hungarian students differ from those of the American students.

magyar

angol

Könyv része

NonPeerReviewed

part

http://acta.bibl.u-szeged.hu/68851/1/papers_022_007-034.pdf

Balogh Erzsébet: Hungarian student’s language attitudes towards regional American English accent varieties. In: Papers in English and American studies : Tomus XXII. - Distinguished Szeged student papers, (22). pp. 7-34. (2012)

http://acta.bibl.u-szeged.hu/68851/