Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Social Media and Perceptions of American English



Main Purpose
To find out what students without American accents do to make their voice-activated smartphone technology successful. To find out if social media has helped improve their English or helped them maintain their native dialect. To find out their perceptions about American English and if they want to sound more American or keep their dialect.

Preliminary Exploration
survey results- 350 responses, still analyzing

Relevance
A. This research is very relevant to digital culture. Communication technologies and social media interaction raise questions all the time about what we think about languages and dialects. Technology has expanded our communication possibilities, and developers of phones and websites have to consider different languages and dialects to make their products useful for as many people as possible. Also with increased communication American media has spread to so many countries. What do citizens of other countries think about American English? Is American English prestigious, standard, attractive, etc.?
B. Useful for linguists who study perceptual dialectology, language, and technology

Format
Research paper/academic article: the article will be in the format of a traditional linguistics research article

Venue
I will submit my paper to the Young Researchers Workshop which accepts papers from international graduate and junior researchers on communication, including the field of linguistics.

Curation
A. Survey responses
B. Scholarly journal articles
C. International students, professors, peers

Social Proof
I have received feedback from international students, friends, family, classmates, coworkers, professors. I have gotten sufficient feedback from the actual survey respondents (international students).

Next Steps
I've already analyzed a lot of the data, and now it's just writing and explaining the trends and what they mean.


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