How You Say It by Katherine D. Kinzler

Author:Katherine D. Kinzler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780544987425
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

ALADDIN’S ACCENT

Children start out with a preference for “native” ways of speaking, but they don’t necessarily know much about the alternatives—they may not really care about the differences between unfamiliar accents or languages to which they have not regularly been exposed. Before long, however, this changes. As they grow older, children figure out that status and prestige are associated with some dialects but not others. Tragically, while they might still like the sound of their own speech, many children also figure out early on that their own dialect is not considered a “high status” way of speaking. This loss of innocence and security related to one’s own voice can be profound and devastating—for the children who experience it, and for society at large.

My former PhD student Jasmine DeJesus and I wanted to better understand when and how children in the United States start to think about certain accents as having more status than others. We decided to compare their attitudes toward Northern American and Southern American English, accents that are associated with deep-seated stereotypes; when American adults are asked to draw a map of where different kinds of speech in the United States are found, they consistently draw the South as an area—and claim that they speak the “worst” English there. Even Southerners seem to share knowledge of these stereotypes and often feel insecure about the way they speak. When, we wanted to know, did the children in our study pick up on these attitudes—and did kids in both the North and the South respond similarly or differently to these accents?

We presented kids from Illinois (“the North”) and Tennessee (“the South”) with voices from both areas and tested them to see which they preferred, and what they thought of each voice. We tested a group of kindergartners (five to six years old) and fourth graders (nine to ten years old), and we found that the responses of the older children (but not yet the younger children) reflected societal attitudes—stereotypes—about the two different accents. Younger kids in kindergarten showed that same relative preference for familiar speech that I discussed above.* But they didn’t seem to know anything about the particular voices—what they signified or what stereotypes were attached to them. By age nine, kids in both places had a firm grasp of the stereotypes that are present in adults’ intuitions—they thought that the Northern voices sounded smarter and more in charge; they thought that the Southern voices sounded nicer.

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