Course: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Accents, Attitudes and Identity

Here Dr George Bailey talks about how people use spelling to represent their accents on social media. How do you write on social media and how does this compare to …

Watch Dr Dominic Watt describe a current research project that explores language discrimination in the hiring process of jobs in the legal sector. Share your thoughts about the video with …

Professor Paul Kerswill offers a short video on the topic of MLE, or Multicultural London English. Does the video raise any particular issues or ideas for you? Share with the …

So far on this course, we’ve mainly framed accentism as a negative thing. But if accent discrimination is so widespread, and it is not a criminal offence, are there any …

An emerging topic of study for sociolinguists is that of ‘accentism.’ The term accentism describes discriminatory or unfair behaviour centred on someone’s accent or language use. Accentism is increasingly something …

‘Salience’, ‘audience design’ and ‘accommodation’ are commonly explored in sociolinguistic research. Watch Professor Paul Kerswill explain more in this short video. Is there anything which particularly strikes you in what …

Let’s begin this activity by looking at some of the main considerations sociolinguists must face when they want to conduct their own research. Ethics No matter who is being studied, …

In this video, Dr Sarah Kelly describes an example of a linguistic factor: the effect of position in the word on how different variants of the ‘t’ sound in English …

In this video, Dr Claire Childs explains the link between the attitudes we have about accents and how these relate to ideas of ‘correct’ language use. Let’s take some time …

Let’s look now at a real-life example of a language attitude. The text below is taken from an email sent to BBC presenter Steph McGovern after one of her regular …

When we talk about language attitudes in sociolinguistics, we’re looking at how people associate different forms of language with positive and negative traits. As well as the idea of a …