Devyani Sharma | Queen Mary, University of London (original) (raw)

Papers by Devyani Sharma

English World-Wide, 2022

Do accent biases observed half a century ago (Giles 1970) and 15 years ago (Coupland & Bishop 200... more Do accent biases observed half a century ago (Giles 1970) and 15 years ago (Coupland & Bishop 2007) still hold today in Britain? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population (N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hierarchy of accent status. We find little evidence of demotion of conservative prestige varieties or reranking of accents, although we do observe a slight improvement in lower rankings. We focus in detail on age and life stage, finding that most of the age patterns observed in earlier studies were in fact instances of age-grading (lifespan effects), not real-time change in attitude. The midlife phase of life corresponds to conservative shifts in the perception of global, migrant-heritage, and stigmatised varieties. Our findings add change in speech evaluation to the growing body of research on lifespan change in speech production. Finally, although effects of ethnicity, social class, regional self- and other-bias, and age remain firmly in place, earlier gender differences in respondent behaviour have more or less disappeared.

Keywords: Language attitudes, British accents, region, ethnicity, social class, bias, prestige, lifespan change, age-grading, real time change.

Journal of Language and Discrimination, 2019

Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is... more Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent to which accent-based prejudice affects elite professions. In this article we focus specifically on methodological innovations in this project, rather than detailed results. We describe our approach to four challenges in the study of accent bias: how to assess whether accent preferences actively interfere with the perception of expertise in candidates’ utterances; how to more precisely identify sources of bias in individuals; new technologies for real-time rating to establish whether specific ‘shibboleths’ trigger shifts in evaluation; and how to assess the efficacy of interventions for combating implicit bias. We suggest integrating best practices from the fields of linguistics, social psychology, and management studies to develop sound interdisciplinary methods for the study of language, discrimination, and social mobility.

Keywords: Accent discrimination, legal profession, research methods, anti-bias interventions

London is Europe’s largest city, and over a third of the foreign-born population of the UK lives ... more London is Europe’s largest city, and over a third of the foreign-born population of the UK lives there, with inner London boroughs having some of the highest proportions. In this paper, we look at how this intense level of inter-ethnic contact has influenced styles of English variation and use. The discussion starts with the large-scale picture and moves to individual practice, reflecting on how the two relate to one another. Focusing on the sociolinguistic dynamics of two Asian-dominant ‘micro-ecologies’ (Tower Hamlets and Ealing), we address the central puzzle of sociolinguistics today: How to reconcile the fine, fleeting acts of agency we see constantly in the individual with the blindly uniform march of change that we see at the community level? Our analyses point to a complexity that calls for refinement rather than rejection of traditional urban sociolinguistic models.

Varieties of English Around the World, 2014

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Feb 28, 2009

This study confirms the robustness of the finding in the literature on African American Vernacula... more This study confirms the robustness of the finding in the literature on African American Vernacular English [AAVE] and creole English (especially in the Caribbean) that omission of copular and auxiliary be varies systematically according to predicate type. Verbal predicates are associated with the highest rates of copula absence and following NPs with the lowest rates;

Gender and Language, 2007

... 1998. Lip service on the fantasy lines. In Deborah Cameron (ed.). The feminist critique of la... more ... 1998. Lip service on the fantasy lines. In Deborah Cameron (ed.). The feminist critique of language: A reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp. 183216. ... In Sarah Benor, Mary Rose, Devyani Sharma, Julie Sweetland and Qing Zhang (eds). Gendered practices in language. ...

English World-wide, 2009

Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native Engli... more Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native English dialects with variation in postcolonial varieties of English and cross-linguistic typology (Chambers 2004; Kortmann 2004). This article assumes that any search for universals in bilingual varieties must include an assessment of the grammatical conditioning of features and a comparison with the relevant substrates. Comparing Indian English

Studies in Language Variation, 2010

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2005

Linguistic Typology, 2000

While New Indo-Aryan languages are a common example of morphological ergativity, the range of var... more While New Indo-Aryan languages are a common example of morphological ergativity, the range of variation in ergative marking and agreement among these languages has not been examined in detail. The goals of this paper are twofold. We first present a typology of ergative marking and agreement in Indo-Aryan languages, demonstrating that a progressive loss of ergative marking has occurred to varying degrees in different systems. This process is manifested in two distinct strategies of markedness reduction: loss of overt subject marking in the nominal domain and loss of marked agreement in the verbal domain. Using the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993), we account for the typology in terms of universal subhierarchies of markedness . Extending the analysis to dialect variation in one language, Marathi, we show that the dialect typology parallels the cross-linguistic typology, but only within the range permitted by changes already present in the parent language (Old Marathi). Furthermore, the dialect typology includes additional hybrid case-agreement systems predicted by our analysis.

Language Variation and Change, 2011

Language Variation and Change, 2001

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2005

Research on indigenized non-native varieties of English has aimed to distinguish these varieties ... more Research on indigenized non-native varieties of English has aimed to distinguish these varieties from individual second language learning in structural and social terms (B. Kachru 1983; Cheshire 1991); however, quantitative evidence of this divergence remains scarce. Through an analysis of a range of Indian English speakers in a contact situation in the United States, this study distinguishes developing dialect features from second language learning features and explores the concomitant emergence of dialect consciousness. First, an implicational analysis shows that some non-standard variables (past marking, copulause, agreement) exhibit a second language learning cline while others (articles) form a more stable, incipient non-standard system shared to some extent by all speakers; a multivariate analysis suggests that both sets of variables are governed by proficiency levels. Next, the explanatory scope of proficiency is assessed by examining the use of selected phonological variants (rhoticity, l-velarization, aspiration). The use of these features resembles native-like style-shifting, as it appears to be more sensitive to speakers' attitudinal stances than to proficiency levels. This points to the importance of understanding emerging speaker awareness and perceptions of stigma, risk, and value in new varieties of English.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2011

This study has two goals: empirically, it accounts for variation found in the use of ethnically-m... more This study has two goals: empirically, it accounts for variation found in the use of ethnically-marked variants among British-born Asians; methodologically, it assesses the variationist approach against a repertoire approach. In Part I, analysis of one Punjabi-derived phonetic trait, examined in interview data only, suggests that younger women shift to exclusive use of the British prestige variant. Part II expands the analysis to four variables and to broader speech repertoires for four individuals. The repertoire analysis shows the conclusions in Part I to be inaccurate, and instead reveals:

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2009