Have you ever wondered why you pronounce ‘path’ or ‘bath’ differently to some of your friends? Well studying linguistics at a level will tell you. The difference between accents, why people like certain accents and why some accents are deemed ‘unintelligent’ is all resolved in English language a level.
Linguistics a level has shown me a deeper understanding of the English language and lead me to be more observant and aware of the lexis surrounding me. I often find myself tuning in on other people’s language, making mental notes of why they use certain vocabulary, none of which I would’ve done 6 weeks ago. Linguistics opened the door to so much terminology I wasn’t familiar with and now it frequently appears in my speech. From noting my friend’s idiolect to acknowledging people in tv shows accents, English language materializes itself every day.
Within accent and dialect, we researched into different accents and identified certain traits and language patterns within them. Personally, this was very interesting and something I will bear in mind when speaking to new people. We learnt about many accents that I had never heard of before including Estuary English and Multicultural London English (MLE). I found it extremely engaging when we watched how people’s accents had evolved over time; there is a clip of the late queen and it is especially interesting to see her RP accent fade as she got older, and even more interesting was the reasoning behind it.
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