Intro |
Evaluating English Accents WorldWide: BackgroundThis project had its ultimate origins in Bayard's investigation of New Zealanders' attitudes toward their own and other English accents carried out in the 1980s and 1990s (summarised in Chapter 5 of Bayard 1995 and Bayard 2000). He found that a large number of New Zealand listeners had difficulty in correctly identifying the one Australian voice used on his stimulus tape; it was frequently assumed to be a fellow New Zealander. Weatherall and her students became interested in this in the mid-1990s, and Weatherall and Gallois decided to test ease of identification of the broad-to-cultivated range of both accents to see how accurately New Zealanders and Australians could tell their accents apart. They used a tape with male and female voices in the broad (stereotypical "Crocodile Dundee"), general, and cultivated (i.e., approaching RP) ranges of both accents plus a practice voice; this made a total of 13 voices. See Weatherall, Gallois, and Pittam 2000 for details. Weatherall presented details of this research at a New Zealand linguistics conference in 1998, and she and Bayard decided to carry out joint research, widening the scope to include nations other than Australia and New Zealand. As well as Gallois in Queensland who was already involved, Ray at Cleveland State University, and Sullivan at Umeå became involved. After the establishment of this website, interest in the project quickly grew, and in excess of 20 scholars from 17 countries were involved. While we are no longer actively soliciting further data, participants from China, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be most welcome. |