Reactions to African-American Vernacular English: Do More Phonological Features Matter‪?‬

Since its inception in the 1930's, language attitudes research has demonstrated that language is a powerful social force that does more than convey intended referential information. For better or worse, hearers react to linguistic and paralinguistic variation in messages as though they indicate both personal and social characteristics of the speaker. For example, a stranger may be judged incompetent due simply to a slow rate of speech (Brown, 1980). Because such beliefs about language use can bias social interaction, language attitudes represent important communicative phenomena worth understanding. As a field of study, language attitudes research is concerned with the social consequences of any number of different language behaviors (e.g., speech style, speech rate, gender-linked language, or code-switching). However, among all language behaviors, the most studied and perhaps the most socially significant is accent. Over the years, scores of studies have compared reactions to varieties of accents found throughout the world, including the United States, and have found that accents matter greatly (see Bradac, Cargile & Halett, 2001). Those who speak with an accent deemed "standard" within a particular community (i.e., the variety most often associated with institutional control and power, see Edwards, 1982) tend to be rated highly on traits related to competence, intelligence, and social status, whereas "non-standard" accented speakers are evaluated less favorably along these same dimensions, even by listeners who themselves speak with a non-standard accent (Ryan, Hewstone & Giles, 1984). This patterned reaction is particularly robust in the case of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).