Regional Variation as an Individual’s Social and Cultural Brand: Native and Non-native Perspective

Abstract

The present paper investigates Serbian EFL learners’ attitudes and stereotypes towards speakers whose speech is marked by features of different local varieties in Serbian, as a mother tongue, and English, as a foreign language. The study has a twofold aim: on the one hand, we aim to investigate whether the speaker’s regional variety can affect their public image and the first impression they make on a listener, and on the other hand, we seek to provide an insight into the level of stereotyping which students educated in philology attribute to the perceived accents. In order to conduct an empirical analysis we asked students to listen to the pre-recorded speakers of their mother tongue (L1) and a foreign language (L2), who were typical representatives of regional varieties. The students had the task to provide descriptions of the speakers along three sociolinguistic dimensions: social status, level of competence and linguistic attractiveness, and for this particular purpose a semantic differential scale of attributes was implemented. The results showed that Serbian EFL learners employed a higher level of negative stereotyping when describing speakers from L1 than from L2, which, although expected, indicates that a higher level of negative stereotyping is present if students are dealing with languages and cultures that are more familiar, or in some way closer to them, be it psychologically or emotionally. However, they easily managed to ascribe certain characteristics to speakers merely based on the way the recorded people spoke, which serves as an indication that a local linguistic variety functions as a particular brand of an individual’s identity.