Comparing and contrasting the articles to our class work

Yorkshire named top twang as Brummie brogue comes bottom:

This was a article published by the guardian, talking about how different accents are associated with the degree of intelligence and education of an individual. In this article, the Yorkshire was compared to other accents or dialects such as the Birmingham accent. In this survey, it was found that no accents which were tested made someone more attractive or less attractive, however, the type of accent a person spoke had a “significant impact on whether or not a particular model was seen as intelligent.” By doing a survey, Dr. Lance Workman was able to see that the Yorkshire accent had the highest average intelligence rating (6.71/10), while the Birmingham accent had the lowest average intelligence (5.6/10) out of the accents that were tested. Dr. Lance Workman went on to say that this is due to “regional stereotypes”. He said: "Surveys have shown that a lot of people associate Birmingham with criminal activity, and they associate criminal activity with low intelligence.” This links to our class work as we discussed how different English dialects are perceived. This is also seen in the passage from “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, as her mother’s “broken” english is seen as less intelligent, like the Birmingham accent in this survey.

You Say Up, I Say Yesterday:

In this article, the author illustrates the differences between languages as well as how certain languages have words for things that other languages do not have a word for. For example, there are several german words which cannot be translated into english in one word (Backpfeifengesicht in german would roughly translate to a face that cries out for a fist in it). This links  in to our class discussion where we talked about the different words in languages other than English which have not direct translation to English. The author the goes on to state the structural differences between languages such as Spanish, English, Russian, etc. One example would be how in Spanish or Japanese, intent matters. This is not the case in English, as the intent does not matter. For example, this is seen when in English when someone “knock[s] this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, ‘She[/He] Broke the Cup’”. This is however not the case in other languages where the intent matters. 

Bilingual Mind: Understanding how the Brain Speaks Two Languages:

In this article, the author Jeffrey Kluger discusses the benefits of being bilingual and how the brain is able to speak two languages. The article goes on to say that by being multilingual, people tend to be smarter and quicker at completing tasks. This is seen by the Stroop test, in which people who were bilingual speakers were able to react much faster. This article links to our class discussions and poems that we read in class as they are also about bilingualism. Some poems encouraged the use of using both languages, while the rest of the poems were against the simultaneous use of languages. Overall I believe that the benefits of being bilingual/multilingual heavily outweigh the negatives aspects as the different languages allow us to communicate better and in more ways,as well as help us understand other cultures.