Information
collected from my Questionnaire
I conducted a small research task to find out how the
features of a person had an effect on their attitudes towards other people’s
use of language. I handed out ten questionnaires to a random selection of
people to acquire this information and this is a representation of my findings.
From my research I found that a lot of the feedback was very
similar and a majority of the time, everyone shared the same views. These
questionnaires were handed out to a number of people from each gender group. Even
though there was a differentiation between genders, it did not have any effect
on their answers. I also found that the
occupation of each person did not particularly differ their answers from anyone
else. All of these questionnaires were handed out to people living in the
south-east of England, so there is not much regional difference among the
feedback. However, I found that the biggest factor that produce a different
variety of answers was the age of the person or simply their own personal
views.
I established that older people (particularly 40+) tend to
stereotype and associated certain language and physical features with certain
kinds of people. For example, they would not expect a businessman to have a strong
Geordie accent and they would expect a young black teenager to speak with a
strong London accent and to speak with a lot of London slang.
I found that people living in a certain area would not be
surprised or react differently to someone who has a slightly different accent
to their owner, however, if they came across someone from more adrift, it is
likely that they would get picked on/treated differently. The responses from
the questionnaires showed that if someone moved to Brentwood, from London or
Sussex, they were not discriminated at all. However, one response showed a
person who moved from Scotland into Brentwood and they were originally picked
on for speaking a bit differently from what the local people were used to.
I set up a question that put the person in a hypothetical situation,
where they were an interviewer for a job and I asked whether a person’s accent
would affect the person’s chance of getting the job.
Overall, a majority of the
responses said their accent would have no effect on their decision, but 30% of
the responses said it depended on how strong the accent was and whether they
used any inappropriate slang.
In addition, I composed a question that queried whether the
person thought that their own accent was strong. As expected, a majority of the
responses claimed that they did not believe they had a strong accent. However,
20% of the answers said they did and stated that ‘anybody would be able to tell
that I am from Essex.’
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