Non-native speaker perception: Dutch Language Attitudes Towards the British and American English Accent with Regard to Sophistication

Abstract

Against a media backdrop of film and television this study will explore Dutch language attitudes towards the British and American English accent with regard to sophistication. In order to investigate non-native speaker perception, an experiment was carried out among Dutch students using audio material from the British crime drama Broadchurch (2013) and its American remake Gracepoint (2014). A questionnaire consisting of Likert-scales and open questions was used to test the language attitudes of the respondents. The results showed that there was only a slight difference in the evaluation of the two accents when it came to the intelligence and competence part of sophistication. When looking at the results regarding the social and economic part of sophistication, however, the evaluation of the accents differed significantly. Overall, it could be concluded that especially when it comes to social status and economic welfare, the Dutch respondents assigned the British English speaker a slightly higher level of sophistication than the American English speaker.