Investigating Attitudes towards an Emerging Standard of English: Evaluations of Newscasters' Accents in Trinidad

This paper addresses the issue of the emergence of new standards of English in the postcolonial world by means of a language attitude study conducted in the Caribbean island of Trinidad that involved rating the accents of newscasters. Accents represented in the clips played to respondents comprised various local as well as non-local ones. The respondents disfavoured a local accent displaying many features shared with Trinidad's English-based Creole and particularly favoured a local accent that showed the comparatively greatest distance from Creole. Intermediate Trinidadian accents as well as non-local ones were in between and rather undifferentiated. We suggest that several partially conflicting factors are relevant to these results--a perception of Standard English in terms of distance from Creole, increasing endonormativity, as well as global influences that are particularly present in the media domain--and we support the notion that Standard English is becoming a more complex phenomenon in today's world that needs to be considered in relation to contexts of use. (Contains 7 tables and 10 footnotes.)