Accentedness isn’t Abnormal Speech; it’s a Badge of Identity

About the Book

This research is on foreign accents. The researcher-author—a non-native fluent English speaker discovered through a lit-review that all people speak in accent. This research focused on attitudinal self-accented speech perceptions of Kisii-Kenyans in the USA and further investigated what North American English (NAE) speakers’ perceptions are toward the Kisii-Kenyan accentedness. Two groups participated in this study. First, college educated Kisii-Kenyan adults, and second, NAE speakers participated in the study. A likert scale type of questionnaire was used to collect data from the first group and was analyzed for result. The second group listened to speech clips from two Kisii-Kenyan volunteers and hence assessed their accentedness and intelligibility. The findings revealed Kisii-Kenyans’ perceptions of themselves as confident and positive in their accented English speech. On the American perceptions it is not conclusive, and the assessments do not reveal any validity of judging Kisii-Kenyans as incomprehensible and unintelligible.

About the Author