Good to Sound Bad: A Study on Attitudes towards the RP British English Accent

Abstract

A villain is not really a villain if they do not have an RP British English accent, according to many big budget films produced in Hollywood. It would therefore be expected that the universal target audience of those Hollywood films might perceive the RP accent as stereotypically evil or would at least be aware of this stereotype of the RP accent. This thesis aims to find out if this perception is indeed present by testing the attitudes of RP, GA and Standard Dutch participants towards the RP accent. Participants listened to audio clips from speakers with either an RP or GA accent and were asked to rate the speech on both status traits and solidarity traits on a Likert-type scale. Using a matched guise paradigm, stimuli came from four speakers, each able to speak with both a native-like RP and GA accent. Results show that the Standard Dutch participants rated the RP accent more favourably than both RP and GA speakers did. These findings imply that the stereotype of the RP accent does not always hold in non-native English-speaking countries.