Govor, Vol. 39 No. 1, 2022.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/govor.2022.39.02
Students’ identification of different English varieties
Alma Vančura
orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-2681
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia
Filip Alić
orcid.org/0000-0001-6249-2782
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia
Abstract
Today’s technology allows quick and easy communication with speakers from a variety of language backgrounds, and the communication of online participants is predominantly in English. Although much is already known about the attitudes of Croatian students towards their own English pronunciation (e.g., Lütze-Miculinić, 2019; Josipović Smojver & Stanojević, 2013, 2016; Stanojević & Josipović Smojver, 2011) or about different English varieties (Drljača Margić & Širola, 2014), there has been no research regarding students’ identification of different English varieties in Croatian context. Previous studies (Williams, Garrett, & Coupland, 1999) have shown that listeners can categorize unfamiliar speakers by dialect with about 30% accuracy. Apart from familiarity, an important role in variety recognition is played by regional closeness and exposure to the variety. The present research is set out to study how accurately students can identify individual speakers of different regional and EFL varieties of English. The study was conducted on 68 first-year English students who completed an anonymous questionnaire. The items for the questionnaire were based on Alić (2021) and Paunović (2009). The study was based on a verbal-guise technique, where participants listened to 10 speakers reading out the same paragraph. Croatian students showed poor results in variety recognition. They had the best identification results when listening to Croatian speaker speaking English (76.9% of correct identifications), which is of no surprise as he was the only EFL speaker and the students were familiar with this type of accent. They had the most problems identifying the speakers from South Africa (13.4%) and Northern Ireland (10.8%). The results show that students probably till operate with very broad concepts, like "British" or "American" English, since they were unable to pinpoint the speakers from South England (32.8%) or California (19.7%), varieties that can often be heard in various settings. The Californian speaker was identified as a speaker from New York (19.7%), Southern USA (18.1%) and Canada (16.6%), which shows that subtle differences in regional identity are lost to the untrained ear, and that familiarity sometimes does not play an important role in variety identification.
Keywords
English varieties, identification, misidentifications, attitudes, Croglish
Hrčak ID:
284704
URI
Publication date:
25.10.2022.
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