Educated or Uneducated Accent

Mark   Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:04 pm GMT
ok i ve been reading alot in this forum about the pronounciation of the literates or illiterates but i am not able to distinguish between both of them Or in other words i need guidlines to make my pronounciation seem to be educated though i am not aware of that whether i speak eaducated or not, but if you have any information that which are the educated ones or how to pronounce educated or which group of people or which community or any hollywood actor that speaks educated please let me know.
Besides pronounciation can Accents be educated or uneducated?????
Secondly if you are workin in an organization that involves interaction with clients of different dialects and different pronounciation then a person whosetalkin to them should mould his pronounciation and speaking style according to the customer or not, or shouldhementain his educated pronounciation even if the customer is uneducated and feels difficulty in understanding the person on job.
Guy   Tue Nov 01, 2005 2:17 pm GMT
If you're truly educated, you will end up sounding educated, I think.
Guest   Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:13 pm GMT
Accents don't necessarily link up with a person's level of education! To think there is such a connection is really being classicistically snobbish. Sorry to be a wee bit sibilant there...I sounded like an angry grass snake.

It id possible to have a strong regional accent and still have a string of letters after your name. It's the WAY you express yourself in a generally accepted standard of English, using what is generally accepted to be the correct rules of grammar and syntax. A vocabulary which is quite extensive is also a good indication of a person's standard of education.

Accents as such should not be a factor as long as these standard practices are maintained. In any business / commercial environment, or in any formal situation, a good stadard of spoken English is pretty well essential otherwise it would reflect badly on the organisation concerned. It's an image issue, after all. So speaking in a local accent should be acceptable so long as it is not extreme and and does not lapse into dialectal terms which would not be understood by many other people not familiar with them. Even if they would, it's not good professional practice.

What you do in your private life is a different matter.....outside of work many of us speak and interact quite differently, but don't mix the two.

It would be wrong to "mould your pronunciation" or change your speech pattern just to adapt to the person(s) with whom you are interacting. Lowering your standard to what you think is the level of a client, or whoever in the organisation, is a form of insult and they may see it as such. Just talk in your normal professional way, whatever your native accent...it adds some flavour to the conversation.
Damian in Edinburgh   Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:15 pm GMT
I've done it again......the last Guest only was me.
Rick Johnson   Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:06 pm GMT
As Guest (Damian) mentioned its more about using the correct rules of grammar and syntax and also the types of words you use. People who crate adjectives by putting "y"s on the end of words several times in a sentence, would often be considered to be uneducated.
Rick Johnson   Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:07 pm GMT
<<crate>> and people who can't spell create
Brennus   Wed Nov 02, 2005 7:18 am GMT
More educated people speak certain accents than others but all accents have some educated speakers.

For example, even though the southern accent in the U.S. is often associated with yocals, hilbillies, sharecroppers and migrant workers who had little or no formal education, this view was never totally representative of the situation in the South. All of the southern states still had good universities whose graduates were certainly well-educated. Mississippi alone has produced such fine writers as Eudora Welty, Oprah Winfrey, William Faulkner, and Shelby Foote just to name a few.
Travis   Wed Nov 02, 2005 4:32 pm GMT
>>More educated people speak certain accents than others but all accents have some educated speakers.<<

I myself would dispute the notion that there are "educated" or "uneducated" dialects (what you use the term "accents" to refer to) in the first place.
Travis   Wed Nov 02, 2005 4:58 pm GMT
>>Accents don't necessarily link up with a person's level of education! To think there is such a connection is really being classicistically snobbish. Sorry to be a wee bit sibilant there...I sounded like an angry grass snake.<<

I agree completely (except with respect to the "sounding like an angry grass snake" part), and no, you should not have at all weakened or qualified your statement above.

>>It id possible to have a strong regional accent and still have a string of letters after your name. It's the WAY you express yourself in a generally accepted standard of English, using what is generally accepted to be the correct rules of grammar and syntax. A vocabulary which is quite extensive is also a good indication of a person's standard of education.<<

The thing though is that when you say the term "accent" here, you really mean "dialect" (accent really just being how others perceive the different phonologies of dialects other their own), and the thing, of course, is that grammar/syntax/whatever changes from dialect to dialect, as does vocabulary as well. For example, I myself in everyday usage in my dialect am used to some things that I am almost certain that those who *really* insist on what they call "standard English" would not exactly like, such as adverbial "sort of" and "kind of" applied to things other than nouns, or more specifically to my dialect (for reasons I won't get into here), "by" being used to mean "at" (which may confuse some not used to such). Of course, as such uses are not really actively stigmatized, even though they may annoy some strong conservatives, and the latter may confuse some, they are generally not actually denounced when present *in speech*, unlike the classically stigmatized examples of double negation or "ain't".

As for overall vocabulary range, the matter with that is that what *sections* of vocabulary one would use often changes depends on register. While one may have a wide knowledge of vocabulary in general does not mean that one will *use* a large portion of it, in particular French and Latinate vocabulary, in informal language, where one is very likely to use constructions based on primarily Germanic vocabulary instead, which is likely to involve a narrower range of *active* vocabulary but at the same time more complex usages of such. Hence, someone's overall range of actual vocabulary that they may use may not be directly apparent in speech, as much of it may primarily show up only in writing, due to being mainly literary in nature in the first place.

>>Accents as such should not be a factor as long as these standard practices are maintained. In any business / commercial environment, or in any formal situation, a good stadard of spoken English is pretty well essential otherwise it would reflect badly on the organisation concerned. It's an image issue, after all. So speaking in a local accent should be acceptable so long as it is not extreme and and does not lapse into dialectal terms which would not be understood by many other people not familiar with them. Even if they would, it's not good professional practice.<<

I myself am used to just speaking in the same exact dialect for all purposes, with only variation in register (but even then, I use a "low" register for almost all purposes, including at work, and use a "high" register only for force, extra politeness, talking to non-native speakers, or simply waxing poetic for it own sake). The matter is that while some forms more specific to my own dialect, for example, are primarily limited to "low" registers, some are present through all registers, such as constructions using "by" as "at", which I only realized as being limited essentially to my dialect relatively recently (a few years ago, really) exactly due to such being present through all registers here.

>>What you do in your private life is a different matter.....outside of work many of us speak and interact quite differently, but don't mix the two.<<

The matter, though, is that I do not intentionally try to speak in any fashion other than I normally do for most purposes at work, rather than trying to speak at all in some kind of "neutral", so to speak, fashion at all there. And this seems to apply just as much to others here as well, as I really do not notice any real difference between the language used at work and the language used at home here.

>>It would be wrong to "mould your pronunciation" or change your speech pattern just to adapt to the person(s) with whom you are interacting. Lowering your standard to what you think is the level of a client, or whoever in the organisation, is a form of insult and they may see it as such. Just talk in your normal professional way, whatever your native accent...it adds some flavour to the conversation.<<

The matter is that you cannot separate notions of "accent" and "dialect"; "accent" is just how others "hear" one's own dialect (or one hears others' dialects).
Brennus   Wed Nov 02, 2005 11:48 pm GMT
Travis,

You cannot deny that there are educated and uneducated levels of speaking in any language of the civilized world. For example, I have found that Spanish speakers I've talked to from countries other than Mexico consider the Mexican Spanish word 'vato' ("fellow; guy; dude") to be very low class and almost acted like it was a word that I shouldn't utter.

With regard to accents, generally speaking, there is no correlation between accent and educational level but even in English someone who says "Gimme dat!" instead of "Give me that" is going to strike most people as uneducated.
Travis   Thu Nov 03, 2005 12:18 am GMT
>>With regard to accents, generally speaking, there is no correlation between accent and educational level but even in English someone who says "Gimme dat!" instead of "Give me that" is going to strike most people as uneducated.<<

Hmm... considering that I myself will say what you write as "gimme dat" at times, and in the same contexts "give me that" would probably come off as overly carefully enunciated and sounding too formal. And considering that most people here almost certainly say "gimme that" very often in reality, and "gimme dat", with an expressed /D/ -> [d], is probably not very uncommon here at all in reality either. And as I haven't seen anyone here really saying anything to the effect that such is "uneducated", I would be that such is more a matter of what *you* think or you think others than than of what others necessarily actually think.
Travis   Thu Nov 03, 2005 12:22 am GMT
>>You cannot deny that there are educated and uneducated levels of speaking in any language of the civilized world. For example, I have found that Spanish speakers I've talked to from countries other than Mexico consider the Mexican Spanish word 'vato' ("fellow; guy; dude") to be very low class and almost acted like it was a word that I shouldn't utter.<<

Well, that's more a matter of speakers of certain dialects intentionally not using words from other dialects than any kind of actual "uneducatedness" actually being tied to such words. Compare, for example, the attitude towards "y'all" amongst many in the northern US, which in reality is more than simply some kind of deprecating certain forms based on "uneducatedness", as it is specifically deprecating certain forms as they are from certain other dialects.
Damian in Scotland   Thu Nov 03, 2005 8:38 am GMT
Speaking from the British viewpoint which is all I know really, it IS possible to speak in a noticeable regional accent and yet speak in a manner which immediately denotes a good level of education. The style of presentation of speech is the defining factor. As for the "gimme dat" example, that's a definite no-no for anyone in any professional/academic environment and quite out of the question in this context. Down at the pub after hours would be a different thing, but even then not many people would do that except in certain circumstances.

A whole array of radio/TV correspondents here have regional accents to varying degrees...like an economics corresponent with a noticeable Lancashire accent and a social affairs spokesperson with a slight west country accent. I agree that some accents are generally more acceptable than others here in the UK. Whatever the level of education a person has...a whole string of degrees after his/her name.....he or she would not really strut their professional stuff in broad Scouse or a semi comical Black Country twang. It's a fact of life that most people would not take to that too well.
Travis   Thu Nov 03, 2005 9:42 am GMT
>>Speaking from the British viewpoint which is all I know really, it IS possible to speak in a noticeable regional accent and yet speak in a manner which immediately denotes a good level of education. The style of presentation of speech is the defining factor.<<

I wouldn't be surprised if that much of what you indicate as "denoting a good level of education" would sound just quite stilted and or snobbish here, were one to speak all day like such.

>>As for the "gimme dat" example, that's a definite no-no for anyone in any professional/academic environment and quite out of the question in this context. Down at the pub after hours would be a different thing, but even then not many people would do that except in certain circumstances.<<

The thing about "gimme dat" is that, at least in my opinion, relative to matters here, such is a very weak example of "non-standard-ness". Hell, "gimme" in itself is practically universal in actual usage here, and "dat" is simply due to the tendency of word-initial /D/ to be stopped here (which notably is *not* a widespread aspect of non-AAVE NAE dialects, but which is very common in my dialect outside of formal speech). If one actually wants a real good example of what might not be best to use at work, use forms such as more extreme examples of cliticization (such as "d'y'ave" for "do you have"), and even then, some classes of examples of multiple clitics being strung together are still practically ubiquitous here (all the "n't've" cases, for example).

>>A whole array of radio/TV correspondents here have regional accents to varying degrees...like an economics corresponent with a noticeable Lancashire accent and a social affairs spokesperson with a slight west country accent. I agree that some accents are generally more acceptable than others here in the UK. Whatever the level of education a person has...a whole string of degrees after his/her name.....he or she would not really strut their professional stuff in broad Scouse or a semi comical Black Country twang. It's a fact of life that most people would not take to that too well.<<

All of this makes me really wonder why the hell all of this really matters so much. If we NAE speakers can, for the most part (that is, except in the unfortunate cases of AAVE and Southern American English), speak a single speech form both at work and at home, no matter how far it actually is from some idealized "General American", why do people in the UK have to make such a good deal about all of it. Why is it that if someone doesn't use the same grammar and usage as RP that they don't "sound educated"? Why is it that "accents" that aren't RP are acceptable, but actually really speaking any dialect other than it, in the aforementioned contexts, is not (as if one still has to maintain some kind of affectation of speaking some kind of "standard" English)?
Candy   Thu Nov 03, 2005 10:57 am GMT
<<Why is it that if someone doesn't use the same grammar and usage as RP that they don't "sound educated"? Why is it that "accents" that aren't RP are acceptable, but actually really speaking any dialect other than it, in the aforementioned contexts, is not (as if one still has to maintain some kind of affectation of speaking some kind of "standard" English)? >>

Damian didn't mention anything about RP.

<<why do people in the UK have to make such a good deal about all of it>>

I don't think they do, really, but this is a language forum, where we're analysing (analyzing??) such things. I really doubt that many people in the UK give much thought to this at all. It's not as 'conscious' as that. It's true that in the UK we tend to judge people by their accent/dialect, but I think that most people are unaware of doing it. Sometimes I've brought myself up short by hearing a strong local dialect, unconsciously assuming the person must be 'thick', then realising they have a PhD! I think it was Shaw who said 'No Englishman can open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him'.
As Damian says, there's a kind of hierarchy of accents (dialects) in the UK, and sometimes in newspapers they do surveys to find people's 'favourite'. Again though, I don't think people think about this too much unless they read the paper, and think 'hmm, do I prefer Geordie or West Country?'