ENGA3 - Accent & Dialect revision

Accent and Dialect is one of the topics that could appear in Section A for Language Variation but also in Section B for Language Discourses. Over the last few months, I've added lots of links for this topic for the students taking the new A-level (where the topic appears in the 1st year of the course) but all of these are relevant (and some are really excellent) for your work on ENGA3. Here's a selection of useful posts and links:

• What's happening to regional accents and dialects? Some interesting articles based on the work of David Britain and others involved in the English Dialect app. Here's one from the i about the findings of the survey, one from the Telegraph on the same and another from The Guardian offering an opinion piece on dialect levelling (for that's what it is).
• Attitudes to accents - if you listen to this Thinking Allowed episode from about 14 minutes in, you get a good discussion between Paul Kerswill and Alex Berrata about attitudes to regional accent and dialect in the teaching profession and more widely.
• "You don't sound like a professor" - a recent article on prejudices about regional accents and the class assumptions made about them. And here's one on a similar theme about northern accents (mistakenly) signalling social class and why that might be.
• Here's Susie Dent on UK accents as "spoken birthmarks"
• And here's a really excellent edition of Word of Mouth called Accents Will Happen which is full of good stuff about how accent and dialect are part of our identity/ies as users of language. Interesting on performance, code-switching and identity - all top band AO2 concepts, usually.

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