Intonation in the perception of Brummie

Abstract

The Birmingham accent, also known as Brummie, enjoys a very bad reputation in Great Britain. It was suggested that its intonation is responsible for the stigma in the first place (How to speak Brummie, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ h2g2/A496352, 2001). Since Birmingham intonation differs from standard British intonation, and because intonation is indeed pragmatically meaningful for the perception of speech, two experiments at Adam Mickiewicz University were carried out to verify the hypothesis. The first one was to answer if Brummie is indeed disfavoured when compared to other dialects. The subjects listened to three Brummie speakers and three speakers of different accents of English, and rated the perceived attractiveness, friendliness and intelligence of the recordings on a 5- point Likert scale. The accent, as expected, was deemed the least attractive and intelligent. The second, core part of the experiment investigated to what extent intonation is responsible for this bad perception of Brummie speech. This time, the subjects were to listen to two versions of the speech sample of a given accent. The first version contained only intonation (the speech was unintelligible), and the second one included only segmentals (intonation was removed from the signal). The modifications were made using the methodology of Van Bezooijen and Gooskens (J Lang Soc Psychol 18(1):31–48, 1999) in PRAAT. The results of the two versions of each recording were then compared. On the whole, it turned out that Brummie intonation is indeed seen more negatively than RP intonation.