Beyond the “gentry aesthetic”
Elites, Received Pronunciation and the dialectological gaze
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12346238 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Britain (0000-0003-4228-0242, University of Bern, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 288-298 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Semiotics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1035-0330 • E-ISSN: 1470-1219 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10350330.2017.1301794 |
| OpenAlex | W2592092504 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 20 |
I argue here that sociolinguistic studies of elite accents have largely been trapped in a methodological and theoretical cul-de-sac, isolated from other work in dialectology, blinkered by outdated concepts of elite status, and entangled with ideologies about standard accents. I begin by presenting the hurdles that face scholars of elite accents in English. There have, firstly, been few robust empirical investigations of English elite accents and our understanding of them has not been integrated into theorisations of language variation and change. Secondly, there has been a consistent but problematic “gentry aesthetic” in work on such accents – a concentration on the aristocratic, landed, private school-educated elite. Thirdly, a cycle of ideological linkages between phonetic descriptions of English, elites and accent standards has led to an overpowering dominance of “Received Pronunciation” (RP) in debate about upper-class accents, preventing us from examining the everyday accents of elites independent both of century-old descriptions of RP and of the assumption that elite accents are standard accents. I conclude by outlining what a dialectology of elites might look like, freed from overpowering orientations to RP and the standard, and enabling elite accents to be integrated into sociolinguistic models of language variation
Dialectology · Elite · Gentry · Ideology · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research
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| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,71 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |