INTER-SPEAKER VARIATION AND THE EVALUATION OF BRITISH ENGLISH ACCENTS IN EMPLOYMENT CONTEXTS

Public attitudes towards social and regional British English accents have been widely researched. However, this work rarely investigates how interspeaker variation within accent groups affects these attitudes even though judgments may differ as a function of the specific phonetic profiles of individuals. This paper examines the public perceptions of five British English accents (two speakers per accent) in interviews through a largescale nationwide survey (n = 1015). We further explore differences in perceptions of individuals in one accent group – Multicultural London English (MLE) – and how these differences relate to the density of accent features in the speakers’ repertoires. Evaluations of accents in interviews reflect previous findings from accent attitude studies (e.g. Received Pronunciation speakers are rated positively). However, individual differences are found for the MLE speakers. The candidate with more marked MLE features (e.g. /k/-backing) is rated more negatively, suggesting that inter-speaker variation is a crucial factor in accent evaluations.

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