BEV results

What are the attitudes towards the Afro-Caribbean influence on standard English?

Findings and analysis

Can any links be made between the respondents?

All of the respondents are part of Shenfield High School Sixth Form so are aged between 16-18. The participants are a mixture of boys and girls, (9 boys and 11 girls). 75% of the recipients were white British, 20% were black British, and 5% were of another ethnicity.

What was the overall opinion?

The overall opinion was that the language used by themselves has been changed by the people that are around them and depend on who they are around. These people said that the main ways that they change their language is to reduce/increase slang, taboo, and colloquialisms depending on who they are with, some also change the register of the language that they use. The main reasons for this was that from other generations you can pick up on the sociolect, and also that you can adapt you’re voice depending on the accent and dialect used by peers.

What does this tell us about the status of Standard English?

These results show that Standard English is still the most respected variation of the language with the highest respect. This shows that even though our society is culturally rich, people still have the perception that supports the sociolinguists Trudgill’s theory. He says that the majority opinion was that the ‘Queen’s English’ held prestige over other variations of English and that every other variation was improper and ‘bad English’.

In my questionnaire, the results for ‘what is bad English’ consisted of:

• ‘Broken English’
• ‘made up words’
• ‘lack of vocabulary’
• ‘not speaking clearly’
• ‘bad pronunciation’
• ‘adding ‘like’ a lot’
• ‘slang’
• ‘curse words and rudeness’
• ‘Essex language’
• ‘chavs’
• ‘road man talk’

This shows that people perceive anything that is not the ‘Queen’s English’ as bad.

What attitudes are there to Black English Vernacular and other variations of English?

The attitudes to BEV and other variations is that they are not as good as Standard English.  My results show that many opinions on ‘bad English’ derive from BEV. An example of this is ‘road man talk’, which is the general term for language used by black people. ‘Roadman’ refers to a person who is young, and delinquent. This means that the language used by them may be of a low register and they also used many words that are made up or they cause words to have a semantic shift. Typically, the language that ‘roadmen’ uses originates from Black English Vernacular.

 

Conclusions

In conclusion, the attitudes the Afro-Caribbean influence on Standard English is that it is not as good as proper English, which the Queen uses. Many people believe that bad English is the result of BEV integrating with the English language and creating ‘chavvy’ and ‘roadman’ speech. Many people have adopted their own sociolect in order to fit in with other groups also. Therefore, if a white British person is friends with somebody from another ethnicity, they will start to use the language that they use which typically originates from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds. This means that English has been influenced greatly by a multicultural society.