Question: how will you researching dialect benefit us?

Damien Hall answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hi @georgeteam – thanks for this question! It’s an excellent one.

It may be difficult to see the benefits of researching dialects and accents for society, when you compare it to medical research or something, where they’re trying to find a cure for some disease, and the benefit of finding the cure is obvious. But I think of it like this.

A lot of our life is based on interacting with other people, and, if you know more about their accent or dialect, you can have a better relationship with them, and you can be more sensitive to them. An example is in the project I have just finished working on, on the Scottish-English border. We found that it was definitely true that people made their accent more different to the ones across the border if they didn’t like those people – so a Scot who felt really patriotic and didn’t like the English much at all would have more of a Scottish accent than a Scot who did like the English. If you know that kind of thing, you can then take that knowledge to places in the world where it might be dangerous to have the ‘wrong’ accent, and you can help people to be careful about that.

At the moment I am working on a project about different accents of French, and I hope that will benefit people in France, maybe in the teaching of French: if I find that the accents are really quite different, and I provide the science to back it up, people might have to change their teaching methods.

So hopefully that’ll be a bit beneficial! And interesting too… Does that answer your question?