My Idiolect
I think I have many influences and factors to my idiolect. My
main influence is people. I have grown up in Bristol and so have been
surrounded with many different types of Bristolian accents. My family have
quite strong accents which they have passed onto me. Other people who influence
me are my friends. Around them I suppose I speak slang a lot more.
However this is different when around people I haven’t met,
don’t know as well or in power, like; teachers and interviewers. Then I try to
cut my Bristolian accent out and speak more formally. I use fillers quite a lot
which I try to avoid doing. Examples of these are: ‘like’, ‘uh’ and ‘um’. These
are normally used when I’m uncomfortable or feel slightly awkward in the
situation.
I don’t swear but I, like everyone else, do use insulting
words. For me it’s normally to siblings and these are normally ‘idiot’ and ‘stupid’.
I usually use the word ‘amazing’ to explain something good. I naturally pronounce
the ‘ing’ a lot more.
I would describe my voice as small,
which can sometimes cause problems in conversations, as people can’t hear me that
well. In conversations I also unconsciously gesture a lot. If I know the person
well, I sometimes correct them. My position in conversations is with my hand on
my hip or my hands playing with my nails.
The final factor to my idiolect is media. I think this
influences a lot of teenagers now and it’s causing us to sound less formal. We
are starting to mirror the people we admire like actors, singers and other
media characters. I think that this is something that we need to stop doing as
we will soon end up sounding and talking in the same way and not unique.
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