By Eden Shenal

Faculty Mentor: Marisa Martinez Mira

Abstract

The guiding question for my research will be, what are the social impacts on Latino individuals speaking accented English as they live, work, and otherwise interact with US-born native English speakers? Are there adverse stereotypes and perceptions about foreign accents that impact their lives, and if so, what are those impacts and the potential long-term consequences of them?

To pursue this question, I will be interviewing both U.S. born/Latino high school students in the Northern Virginia area as well as Latino students from other Spanish-speaking countries. My goal with these interviews is to gain an understanding of the individual’s relationship with the English language, their personal perceptions and feelings about hearing or speaking English-accented Spanish or Spanish-accented English, and their experiences in the United States with attitudes and perceptions about accented language varieties. I will also inquire about their family and their family’s experiences with accented English or Spanish in the United States, to gauge the potential broader impacts of speaking with an accented variety..

The research process will use three different instruments. First, I will present each subject with a sociodemographic survey in order to classify participants into the US-born of Spanish-speaking country groups as well as fully understand their background and the background of their families. Second, I will give the students a Likert-scale questionnaire about general attitudes and perceptions about foreign accented varieties with specific questions regarding their experiences and their family’s experiences with English, Spanish, and speaking with a foreign accent in the United States. The third instrument will be aninterview with semi-directed questions on the subject of the questionnaire.

By conducting this research, I hope to expand our understanding of the ways in which non-native accented language varieties impact the experiences of Latinos in the U.S.. With this project, my goal is to study what living in the United States and speaking accented English might mean for these participants and their families, and to determine if there may be discriminatory stereotypes about foreign accents in the United States that impact their lives. Questions will address the issue of foreign accented English and the attitudes towards it, what sort of reaction takes places when English-native speakers hear accented English, and whether foreign accented English has affected other areas of their social and work life in the U.S. This type of research is beneficial in understanding the impact of a country’s attitudes about others towards foreign accents on their everyday lives, and how ultimately much language and accents of any type influence (if at all) the ways in which we interact with each other.