Skip to 0 minutes and 8 seconds Has anyone ever asked you, ‘where are you from?’ After hearing you speak only for a very brief moment. Perhaps you’ve been mistaken for being from somewhere you’re not based on your voice. Even if people can easily identify where you’re from, they might have attitudes, positive or negative, towards your accent or dialect. You might also vary the way you speak depending on your occupation, who you’re speaking to, or what you’re talking about. Language therefore plays a crucial role in how we perform our identity, which also affects how we’re perceived by others. Many aspects of our identity can be expressed and perceived through our speech, including age, gender, where we grew up, and our cultural background.
Skip to 0 minutes and 50 seconds This connection between language variation and identity has long been a focus of study for sociolinguists who research language in society. In this four-week course, join us to learn about different language varieties, people’s attitudes towards them, and how this relates to the expression of identity.
