British attitudes towards six varieties of English in the USA and Britain

Abstract: This paper examines British attitudes to six varieties of English in Britain and the USA. In Britain, there seems to be an ingrained, cross-generational aversion to American English and yet, surprisingly according to Giles (1970), British people rate British regional varieties spoken in industrial conurbations such as Birmingham and Manchester much lower than American English in terms both of ‘pleasantness’ and ‘prestige’. To re-examine this, I designed a practical experiment using techniques used in the field of Language Attitude Studies. The experiment drew on and benefited from the fields of both social psychology and sociolinguistics. Honing the technique used in two preceding studies, Giles (1970) and Carranza and Ryan (1975), the experiment was carried out to investigate British attitudes towards not only one variety of American English, but also other regional varieties of that same national variety. It suggested that the British popular aversion to American English was more complex, highlighting, as a reason, the pervasive influence of British class on accent prestige. This study confirmed the existence of a cross-national, tripartite hierarchical framework of accent prestige, divisible into ‘standard’, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’, first suggested by Wilkinson (1965). Sharpening the focus of Giles’ study, my experiment also found that only Network American was significantly more favoured than British regional varieties.