Gitte Kristiansen (Universidad Complutense de Madrid): Perceptions of L1 accents through English as a Lingua Franca: a pan-European experimental study

English has slowly but steadily established itself as the lingua franca of a globalised world. This fact is giving rise to a new linguistic reality that relates to the status of the languages of the European nation states. In this talk we examine the existence of social and linguistic stereotypes when English is spoken as a L2 variety.

Do linguistic stereotypes (Kristiansen 2003, 2010) continue to operate in systematic manners when a lingua franca, such as English within the current socio-historical and linguistic scenario, is spoken instead of the various languages of the nation states? How accurate is our perception of L2 varieties of English in Europe at different levels of abstraction? Do social identities continue to manifest themselves in English spoken as a lingua franca through our mental models of linguistic varieties? 

In order to address these theoretical questions an empirical study was designed to throw light on the ability of native speakers of European languages and regional varieties to identify - and characterise - members of other European nations exclusively on the basis of transfer from their mother tongue to English. In the experiments in question 12 different varieties of English (8 L2 accents and 4 native accents) are identified and evaluated by panels of listeners in 9 European countries and in New Zealand. As we shall see, the results speak not only of impressive degrees of lectal awareness, but also of systematic differences across European language groups.