Language attitudes toward varieties of English: An American‐Japanese context

Abstract

To our knowledge, no data exist on attitudes toward speakers with Japanese accented varieties of American English, an area of profound significance given increasing American‐Japanese contacts across a wide range of applied contexts. This “matched‐guise” study provides such by eliciting Americans’ reactions to a Japanese male talking on two different topics (aggressive versus neutral) using four language varieties (viz., standard, moderate‐accented, heavy‐accented, and disfluent). Speaker evaluations on status, attractiveness, and dynamism traits confirmed certain predictions based on the literature, but some surprising, yet interpretable, patterns emerged in this new domain of American‐Japanese inquiry. Specifically, it was found that Japanese‐accented speakers were evaluated in manner unlike all other non‐standard accented speakers of American English, except those of British and Malaysian background. It is suggested that perceptions of social group competitiveness may be responsible for this pattern of results which, in turn, is discussed in terms of its applied ramifications.