Social and linguistic stereotyping: a cognitive approach to accents.

Since the early 1960s, labels such as social markers and markers of social identity have been used to explain the findings of a large number of sociolinguistic quantitative studies. Recently, also the notion of linguistic stereotyping has appeared in a few works on accents, ideology and identity. This article examines the languageidentity link from the point of view of Social Identity Theory and Prototype Theory. Special attention will be given to the notion of stereotyping, a central issue in Social Psychology. The hypothesis is that if we consider both the cognitive process of accentuation and the cognitive model of metonymy to be operative also on the level of accentual features, we shall come closer to an understanding of how and why accents may be socially diagnostic: a combination of both processes will enable language users to establish links between linguistic features and social identities in rapid,