“American vs. English” : US American and British English Speakers’ Attitudes toward Phonological and Lexical Features in Accent Tag Videos

Abstract

The study examined two YouTube Accent Tag videos to reveal how pairs of British and American speakers reacted to each other’s and their own varieties as they pronounced words from a list and answered several questions by offering their lexical choices. Accent Tag videos represent a novel way for lay people to be involved in science by offering their language varieties and opinions, accumulating data in unprecedented numbers in the history of dialectology and also creating a rich source for various types of linguistic inquiry. The results showed a marked difference between the manners in which standard-accented British and American speakers evaluated both their own and their interlocutor’s speech. The two RP-accented British speakers were more prone to criticise the two mainstream accented American (General American) speakers’ speech but did not receive criticisms from their interlocutors. Further, neither of the British speakers disparaged their own speech, while one American speaker did. The study also identified some disfavoured features of American English, mainly phonetic differences in comparison with RP, including the lower unrounded LOT-vowel [ɑ], T-flapping, and the flat BATH-vowel [ᴂ] (Wells 1982). The findings of these case studies support the hypothesis that in the game of “American vs English”, RP-accented British English is generally rated higher than mainstream American (or GA) in both groups of speakers.