#12 - Videos- Analysis

In the Pink Panther´s video, the inspector wants to speak and produce a fluent American English accent. Neither the accent nor the pronunciation are produced by the Inspector in his English class. As Yule mentions in his book “The Study of Language” the “accent is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially” ( page 240), in this case the inspector accent shows that he is from France (regionally speaking).

In "The sketch show", there is a group which attend the same English class but belong to different origins and different social groups. They are “a speech community which is a group of people who shares a set of norms and experiences regarding the use of language”.

 Two of the students seem to speak more than one language. According to Yule “regional variation can involve two or more quite distinct and different languages.(...) In this form of bilingualism, a member of a minority(...) learns another language in order to take part in the larger dominant linguistic community ” (page 244). This is the case of the first student who seems to be a Spanish speaker. His pronunciation and grammar are wrong, may be because his dialects are overlapping. And the same happened with the student who has phonological problems (emphasis). He adopts the intonation features (or accent) of another language into the English pronunciation. 

Yule states that social markers are features “in speech that marks you as a member of a particular social group” (page 256) A clear example is the Afro-American boy, who produces some specific phonological features of his social group. 

As a matter of fact, the Afro-American boy and the blonde girl and are English native speakers, but they are not able to understand the meaning beyond their statements, because they belong to different regions in the same country and they have different dialects. This is called regional dialect.

Finally, the girl with vocabulary problems, she seems to have no secular education. Yule talking about education mentions that “those who spend more time in the educational system tend to have more features in their spoken language that derive from a lot of time spent with the written language” (page 255). This is not the case of this girl, she only knows some words.

One of the men of the group has phonological problems despite of the fact that he has studied English at the University of Cairo. He probably learnt Standard English because it is, from a social point of view, “a prestigious dialect originally associated with a center of political power” (page 241). His pronunciation problem is because of his accent. Yule mentions that “some regions have different dialects with a clear stereotyped pronunciation”(page 242) . And it may interfere between the message and the audience of the programme.

Source:  Yule, G (2016). The Study of Language. Chapters 18 & 19 . U.K.: CUP.