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Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 37:1 (2022) ► pp.16–52

Context matters

Grenadian students’ attitudes toward newscasters’ and teachers’ accents

ORCID logo | University of Münster , Germany
ORCID logo | University of Münster , Germany
ORCID logo | University of Münster , Germany | University of Campinas , Brazil
ORCID logo | University of Münster , Germany

This paper presents the results of two largely parallel verbal guise studies that elicited students’ attitudes toward different standard varieties of English. The studies were conducted in the small anglophone Caribbean island country of Grenada. The two studies were contextualized in the domains of education and newscasting, respectively, with the aim of finding out how language attitudes are influenced by context in societies where different endo- and exonormative standards are of relevance. As hypothesized, the results revealed strong differences between the evaluations of speakers of the two domains and confirm that contextualization is crucial in language attitude research. Against previous hypotheses, however, the acceptance of endonormative standard accents was stronger in the more globally open context of newscasting than in the more locally restricted domain of education. The results are discussed against the background of the sociolinguistic situation in Grenada and inform on endonormativity and norm orientation in one of the underresearched island countries of the anglophone Caribbean.

Keywords: language attitudes, Standard English, contextualization, Grenada, education, newscasting, verbal guise technique
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The sociolinguistic situation in Grenada
    • 2.2Indirect attitude studies on Standard English in the anglophone Caribbean
  • 3.Method and data
  • 4.Study 1: The newscaster survey
    • 4.1Stimuli
    • 4.2Results
      • 4.2.1Foreignness
      • 4.2.2Mean ratings of the newscasters on individual items
      • 4.2.3Principal component analysis
      • 4.2.4Reliability ratings
      • 4.2.5Focus group interviews
  • 5.Study 2: Teacher survey
    • 5.1Stimuli
    • 5.2Results
      • 5.2.1Foreignness
      • 5.2.2Mean ratings of the teachers on individual items
      • 5.2.3Principal component analysis
      • 5.2.4Mean ratings of the teachers on the underlying attitude dimensions
      • 5.2.5Focus group interviews
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendices
    • Appendix A.The newscaster survey
      • CLIP X of 8
    • Appendix B.The teacher survey
      • CLIP X of 8
  • References
Published online: 23 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00085.han
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