Welsh Accents and Social Identity: A Study on Perceptions of New and Traditional Speakers

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an accent rating study of Welsh in which 59 raters were asked to listen to speech samples of three speaker groups (Welsh home language speakers, immersion education learners, and adult learners). The study aimed to ascertain(a) whether these groups are identifiable based on their accents, (b) how raters evaluate the three speaker groups socially, and (c) what phonetic features they associate with them. The results revealed that all groups could be identified well above chance and received positive evaluations in terms of status and solidarity-based traits. However, traditional speakers were correctly identified significantly more often and were perceived more favourably in the social evaluations. In the feature analysis, new speakers’ accents were largely described as deviant from traditional speakers’ although some distinctive patterns were also identified. These findings have important implications for discussions surrounding accent bias and the emergence of new speaker varieties.

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