UK students' recognition of speaker origin of UK, US, Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Indian English

What is it about?

The present study attempts to extend understanding of non-linguists’ perceptions of language variation through the investigation of how accurately and consistently UK-born students, resident in the north-east of England, can identify the speaker place of origin of six forms of native and non-native English. The results demonstrate that whilst the process of encoding indexical properties to and categorisations of speech stimulus as belonging to a specific language variety is complex, there is a clear tendency amongst informants to initially identify the speech as either native or non-native, most especially through the perception of specific phonological features (sounds), before attempting more fine-grained classifications. The findings also point to the recognition of speaker place of origin at different levels of awareness, above and below the level of individual consciousness.

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Why is it important?

Until relatively recently, the study of speech perception, i.e. how listeners process and assign social information to the speech they hear (rather than how speech is evaluated), has been less prominent within sociolinguistics. The findings of the present study shed additional insight into the complex nature of non-linguists’ ability to differentiate between and to classify different varieties of L1 alongside L2 English speech. However, equivalent studies involving the presentation of both native and non-native speech stimuli are relatively limited, most especially involving forms of Asian English speech stimulus and amongst UK nationals as listeners. Specifically, the results demonstrate that UK-born participants, resident in the Newcastle area, were generally able to accurately and consistently identify the place of origin of ‘local’ speakers and a speaker of Indian English, and thus, provide evidence that they possess robust perceptual categorisations of these varieties. Further analysis of participant comments points, rather disappointingly, to the existence of a deficit model in relation to identifications of non-native English speech more generally, with a tendency for the UK-born students to attribute their classifications of Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai English speech to perceived errors the speakers made, for both correct and incorrect provenance categorisations. Comments indicated that it was phonological errors these speakers were perceived to make which were deemed most responsible for judgements of their speech as English (e.g. in the lack of opposition between specific phonemes), albeit frequently in conjunction with perceived lapses in grammar and lexis, in the distinctive usage of pragmatic features and at the suprasegmental level.