Responses to Dutch-accented English

Abstract

This paper reports on a study into the reactions of ‘native’ speakers of British English to Dutch-English pronunciations in the onset of a telephone sales talk. In an experiment 144 highly educated British professionals who were either familiar or not familiar with Dutch-accented English responded to a slight Dutch English accent, a moderate Dutch English accent or a ‘Standard British English accent’ (BrE). These accents were rated on the personality traits status and affect, on their intelligibility (orthographic transcription), comprehensibility (identification of key words), and interpretability (paraphrasing the purpose of the message). Although British English was more intelligible and comprehensible than both Dutch English accents, all three accents were equally interpretable. The results indicated that a British English pronunciation evoked more status than both Dutch English accents, and both British English and the slight Dutch English accent commanded more affect than the moderate Dutch English accent.