Which kind of English is worst stigamtized?

Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 1:36 am GMT
Cockkney English or ebony or Aussie English?
US American   Fri Apr 18, 2008 1:41 am GMT
Perhaps US American English?
Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 1:44 am GMT
ebonics
Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:20 am GMT
Scottish?
"I'm Duncan Mcleod of the clan Mcleod"...
guest2   Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:43 am GMT
For everyone who thinks one kind of English is the worst, there are others who find it otherwise, for example:

Plenty of Americans think that Cockney and Aussie English are "cute." (Or at least picturesque.) And many (especially some white American teenagers), think that Black English is cool.
Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:50 am GMT
oh... for "worst stigmatized" I was thinking one that was stigmatized to the extreme, maybe the only way it was widely known, not that it was perceived in a negative manner?
Ed   Fri Apr 18, 2008 4:00 am GMT
I'd say AAVE is most stigmatized.
Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 4:08 am GMT
Have any English dialects been stigmatised in a historical context?
Damian   Fri Apr 18, 2008 7:55 am GMT
ANY form of badly spoken English, no matter where in the English speaking world.....be it anywhere from Blair Atholl to Invercargill, from Newton Abbot to Sacramento, from Durban to Dublin, from Saskatoon to Swansea...if it's badly spoken then it it deserves stigmatisation.

In every country where the official Language is English there are accents and dialects which may well rate high on the "stigmatisation charts" - here in Scotland, it's pretty clear which one tops the list........Glaswegian. No contest.

Down there in England, it's a close call between Scouse (Liverpool and Merseyside) and Brummie (Birmingham and the West Midlands).

Personally, having worked down in London on two separate assignments in the past two years, I would pretty much nominate the relatively new form of London/South East England Estuaryspeak, fairly common among certain sections of the populace. It can be pretty dreich, but that's my opinion, for what it's worth. Others may think it's music to the ears.
Johnny   Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:22 am GMT
I never thought there was an accent that was worse than the others. Of course there are some you like and some you don't like, but that varies from person to person, and from country to country. Anyway, it just came to my mind that maybe there IS one accent that is likely to sound bad to most native speakers: Indian English. What do you think? I never heard of anyone who found it charming, so I wonder if my guess makes sense.
Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:49 am GMT
Jonny, you are right. But Hindhi and English are poles apart. Of course, Indian accent is bad and not good on ears. I second your opinion on this.
Guest   Fri Apr 18, 2008 12:29 pm GMT
In the US (at least from the Hollywood point of view) the most stigmatized accents (that is rarely heard in movies/sitcoms) are 1. AAVE; 2. Southern accents; 3. Indland North/Great Lakes accents.
Most actors from Indland North and South have a Western-like accent.
On the other hand, NYC/ NJ/Philly accents are not stigmatized Hollywood, so in a sitcom set in NYC most people have a NYC accent. In a sitcom set in Chicago (Married with Children, Chicago Hope) no one has a Chicago accent (in the case of Married with Children, everyone had a Californian accent, Bud & Kelly used a pure Valley girl/Surfer dude accent LOL...)
Skippy   Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:45 pm GMT
In the US I'd say it's probably AAVE.
Travis   Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:49 pm GMT
It is somewhat strange in that regard. For instance, there is little stigmatization of Upper Midwestern dialects here at home in Wisconsin (unlike with, say, many Southern dialects which have a degree of stigmatization even by the people who speak them), but at the same time, dialects here practically never show up in the media outside local commercials and interviews with people from here on local TV, and it always sounds very strange to hear such dialects on the TV or radio. The closest thing that I ever hear regularly to such is local radio personalities, which are still rather GA-like in their speech.

Of course, then there is the fact that people in sitcoms set here practically never, ever sound like people here. Hell, they often sound like they are from California... I always wondered why they couldn't just find voice coaches to train them to actually sound like people from here (I doubt that everyone in a TV show set in NYC is really from NYC). Are the people who make these shows seriously deluded into thinking that we "don't have accents" here in Wisconsin in the first place?
Travis   Fri Apr 18, 2008 3:53 pm GMT
The thing that is really strange about all that, now that I think about it, is that I actually hear Southern dialects in non-local media content *far* more than Upper Midwestern ones (and it sounds far *less* strange to actually hear them in such). Same thing with AAVE, to a lesser degree...