March 3, 2017
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levels of education. There are also distinctive lexical variations such as lag for fake,
lad for man, Busy - chokker, and bifter for Cigarette.
One particular study that looked into sociolinguistics and the relationship be-
tween accents, was Dixon, Mahoney and Cocks (2002). Dixon et. al set out to nd
how the general public viewed of the Birmingham Accent and a Received Pronunci-
ation accent. Dixon et. al found that when a group of teenagers listened to a record-
ing of two policeman and were asked to rate their trustworthiness, the majority of
teenagers were more inclined to trust the policeman with the received pronunciation
accent. This can relate back to the perceptions of how Scouse is viewed by outsiders,
and further conrms both my view and the view of ITVs investigation that Scouse
is the least trustworthy and intelligent accent.
In contrast to the Scouse accent, is the Devon accent. In my opinion, even though
Im a londoner, I am more than inclined to agree with the data showing that the
Devon accent is the friendliest, as I nd that its difficult to take anyone seriously
with that accent.
However, even though I have a particular pride and preference for posh accents
like mine, and I have great disdain for the Scouse accent, I believe that its wrong to
explicitly demonstrate someone for their accent as many people in the dataset said
they were. As the world becomes more educated about sociolinguistics and linguis-
tics in general, accents like Scouse will became more and more accepted.