Attitudes to regional and standard accents in commercial and non-commercial contexts

Abstract

Commercials regularly use non-standard accented speakers to promote products and services despite sociolinguistic findings that non-standard accents in non-commercial contexts are evaluated less positively than standard accents. Accent evaluations in commercial contexts may be different because of perceived relevance to the product or service or of perceived manipulative intent. To date, no studies have investigated whether identical accented speech fragments are evaluated differently in commercial and non-commercial contexts.The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of non-standard versus standard accented speech in commercial versus non-commercial contexts in terms of attitudes towards the speaker (competence, status, likeability, dynamism), comprehensibility, attitude towards the product, attitude towards the vlog, and perceived realism of the vlog. In a 2 × 2 between-subject design, 631 Dutch respondents evaluated Dutch standard-accented and regionally accented vlogs in either a commercial or non-commercial context. Findings show that commercial versus non-commercial context had no effect on the evaluations of standard and regional accents. In both contexts, a regional accent was evaluated more negatively than a standard accent for the majority of measures: attitudes towards the speaker (competence, status, dynamism), comprehensibility, attitude towards the product, and perceived realism of the vlog. These findings indicate that a regional accent is a potent negative cue across these contexts, overriding possible effects that are specific to commercial contexts.