Friday, 5 September 2014

My Idiolect





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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