Everyone possesses an opinion about accents and that’s OK, but when those opinions and private preferences start to influence how people are treated and made to feel, that becomes more of a drag . a part of the matter is that the language most of the people use to explain accents is usually rather general and non-specialist, and tied to non-public judgements about people’s characters. So, for instance , even once we think we’re being nice by saying that one area’s accent is ‘warm’ or ‘friendly’ or that somebody else’s accent is ‘charming’ and ‘educated’, it uses language that features a flipside. for every of those adjectives there’s a group of opposing qualities, which we’re implying could be used for other accents: cold, aloof, unfriendly, hostile, charmless, uneducated… stupid. when you’re studying English at A level , I’d argue that it matters. It matters, partly because we’re studying language and that we got to do better than simply use casual descriptions which may cause offence or hurt, but it also matters because we would like you to be ready to analyse discussions about language with a critical eye on Paper 2 and these terms are one among the ways in to doing that, so it pays to be aware of them. Whether it’s attitudes to regional accents, discussions about class and accent, people dropping their accents or being made to feel ashamed about them, or maybe accent prejudice being made illegal, there’s many material out there that might observe Paper 2 Section B texts. But generally speaking, they aren’t written by linguists, numerous of them recycle rather dubious attitudes that some people don’t have accents, that some accents are intrinsically better than others, that we should always encourage people to drop their home accents, or that we should always discourage children from using regional varieties in class . In other cases, they could be written by experts in one field – voice coaching, say – but not by experts in language study itself and people pose their own difficulties, because they will often appear pretty knowledgeable but still peddle some unhelpful and linguistically unsound concepts. they will also – just like the article I linked to earlier today – get their geography a touch shonky… And then we've discussions about accent on social media, where opinions a few person’s character, personality and political persuasion could seep into comments about their accent or language style, comments that in the other case would probably be seen as disparaging and unfair. This has certainly been the case in recent comments about the house Secretary, Priti Patel, whose accent includes a feature sometimes called -g dropping, but which is perhaps more accurately described as using the alveolar /n/ instead of the velar nasal /ŋ/ so words like singing, talking and moving are pronounced as singin, talkin and movin. Whatever your views on her politics (and mine are…umm… *quite* negative) it’s not really fair to attack her accent, because attacking that's likely to form others thereupon accent feel that their speech is being singled out. And they've done nothing wrong. One thing you'll do is to extract some key quotations from a couple of of the articles I’ve linked to during this blog, or a number of the social media posts about accent features, and have a believe how accents are being represented through language. you would possibly ask yourself a couple of of the subsequent questions: · Which adjectives are getting used to explain different accents or ways of speaking? 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Are we, for instance , seeing a discourse of disability or obstruction related to certain accents? A discourse of success attached to others? Accents being presented as ‘opening doors’ or ‘paving the thanks to success’? · Are the speakers of those accents grouped together in any way which may be problematic? Could these representations be challenged from a linguistic standpoint?