Talk:Accent (sociolinguistics)

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2020 and 18 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nickho20.

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment in Fall 2017. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lingip001.

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São Paulo dialect and prestige accents
The section "Prestige" refers to Received Pronunciation as a prestigious accent of English. User:Lguipontes recently expanded the section with reference to Southeastern Brazilian accents of Brazilian Portuguese. I think it is proper to expand the article with a more worldwide view, but the edits somewhat confusingly refer to "the more cultivated paulistano (Greater São Paulo dialect) and carioca (Greater Rio de Janeiro accent)". That is, the prose mixes reference to dialect and to accent.

The source cited appears to treat dialects, particularly lexical and sociocultural differences, rather than accents as such. In relevant part: "Os dialetos existem em enorme quantidade em nosso país, e não estou falando de sotaques" [There exist an enormous quantity of dialects in our country, and I am not talking about accents.] (emphasis added). The blog post goes on to mention lexical difference and to discuss cultural norms in education; there does not appear to be any discussion of accent in the body of the post, thought it is mentioned in the comments.

After I reverted one edit, Lguipontes re-added substantially the same content, but helpfully added the source I refer to above. Rather than engage in an edit war, I have asked Lguipontes to comment here, and would appreciate if other editors could help re-write the section in question, preferably with additional sources that are more on-point. Thanks, Cnilep (talk) 04:12, 6 January 2012 (UTC)


 * That is ok, I comprehend you. Actually, I never engage(d) in edit wars because if I can not prove my point, I tend to agree with the other editor at least for a moment. And this issue of my edits being truthful but generally absent of verifiability (I try to put it always where I find important, sometimes I fail) is constant so I think there is no need for major concern. Right now, I'm quite occupated for personal reasons so I can not resume my point in a just few phrases, I will actually be pretty wordy, but I promise you I'll write something useful the sooner I can. Lguipontes (talk) 15:08, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081008000501/http://linguist.emich.edu/ask-ling/accent.html to http://linguist.emich.edu/ask-ling/accent.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081008000501/http://linguist.emich.edu/ask-ling/accent.html to http://linguist.emich.edu/ask-ling/accent.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121222082936/http://www.poiesis.org.br/files/mlp/texto_16.pdf to http://www.poiesis.org.br/files/mlp/texto_16.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081008000501/http://linguist.emich.edu/ask-ling/accent.html to http://linguist.emich.edu/ask-ling/accent.html

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IP editor(s)
An editor or editors using two different IP addresses (from what seem to be the same ISP) made identical edits to this article on 20 June and and 22 June 2022. The edits removed the short description of "foreign accent" cited to Rosina Lippi-Green's book, English with an Accent. I don't have the book in front of me, but the deleted phrase seems innocuous, and consistent with Lippi-Green's arguments as I remember them.

It is difficult to contact anonymous editors about this. If this person or persons continue removing this phrase, I wonder is some kind of temporary page protection might be warranted? On one hand, page protection seems a bit aggressive to deal with the issue, but on the other hand I can't think of another way to get the attention of an editor using multiple IPs (beyond, of course, this talk page message). Cnilep (talk) 02:43, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Does the 'being understood' section live up to standards?
I am not a frequent editor, so I ask because I do not know. It seems very opinionated, and has a controversial opinion, as it mentions itself. However, it does have a source, though only one, that is 25 years old.

Is the correct way to go about it to reformulate it so it is more evident that this is the opinion of one scholar? I might look for some newer sources on the topic, but I am also uncertain whether such a discussion about ESL should be in a general article on accents.

--loran1212 (talk) 09:11, 29 June 2022 (UTC)


 * At a glance, the section does look more like an explication of one paper (Morley 1996) than an encyclopedic treatment of (an aspect of) accented speech. There is a second citation, but just at the end. Although this is probably controversial, the same can be said of most academic discussions.
 * I would expect to find other points of view – some concurring, some opposed – in the literature on e.g. bilingual education or second/foreign language education. In that case the correct way to reformulate the section, in my opinion, would be to add other sources, and perhaps to reduce the current point to reflect its relative weight in published literature. Here are a few titles from a very quick search. They are not comprehensive, but are a place to start looking:
 * Cnilep (talk) 00:22, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Cnilep (talk) 00:22, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Cnilep (talk) 00:22, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Cnilep (talk) 00:22, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 17 February 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: not moved. (non-admin closure) Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 23:55, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

– the sociolinguistic page gets several more times clicks from Accent than the others, per wikiNav. Akalendos (talk) 19:13, 17 February 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. BilledMammal (talk) 03:48, 25 February 2023 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Accent (sociolinguistics) → Accent
 * Accent → Accent (disambiguation)
 * Oppose It and the musical term are similar in pageviews. There is no primary topic. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 05:42, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Pageviews are largely irrelevant when we have more direct data about usage. This case is a good illustration of the reasons why: this article gets only 1.6 times more pageviews than the music page |Accent_(music), but as evident from the Wikinav data, it receives 24 times more of the actual usage among reader searches. – Uanfala (talk) 13:15, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Even going by longterm significance rather than pageviews, I don't know how you can say musical accents do not have equivalent significance. Music and language are both hugely important. This seems to be a WP:NWFCTM situation, where the use in language is what comes to mind for the nominator. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 21:05, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * You may doubt my intentions for posting the move request, but I will not have anyone entirely discarding discussion for pointing out conceivable personal biases. Now, I did try to find some good criterion to appeal to, that being the wikiNav, which you have not addressed.
 * An important note is that: the articles being discussed are not between Music and Language as general topics, but specific topics/articles in the disciplines. It can't be about our favorite of the two. And we should not need to keep all articles of different subjects to an artificially equal footing, just because they are about different topics of different popularities.
 * Akalendos (talk) 22:58, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. A primary topic for a term needs to be highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term.. The linked Wikinav page gives the figure of 51%, which may appear to meet that criterion, but you need to consider that a) most people don't see 51% as passing the pragmatic bar for being "more likely" than the other topics combined, you'd need higher ratios than that; b) the figure of 51% is itself only an upper bound for the actual figure: destinations with less than 10 clicks don't make it into the Wikinav dataset and so are excluded in the calculations; you can arrive at the lower bound for the actual figure by comparing the clicks for this article (499) to the total views of the dab page for the same period (1,517). – Uanfala (talk) 13:15, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is what it says.
 * From my understanding, the "much more likely" could apply only to "any other single topic," while "more likely than the other topics combined" does not imply a supermajority like the first does. Please feel free to disagree. Akalendos (talk) 19:31, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose ambiguating won't serve readers. In ictu oculi (talk) 13:19, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Strong support. Am I in the twilight zone? Obviously "accent" meaning "way person speaks a language" is primary with regard to long-term significance. Look at Google Books and search "accent" (filtering out the book series "accent on achievement") and 9/10 books on the first page, 9/10 on the second page, and the majority of the rest of the book results are clearly talking about the sociolinguistic concept. This isn't a super-dee-duper clear-cut move request, and I'm not insulting anyone who disagrees, but I will say that opposing the move based on the pageviews criterion is a strawman argument. Red   Slash  05:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * You're right that of the first 10 results in your link, 9 relate to language. But of these, only 4 are about the topic of this article. I count 3 results where the meaning is Accent (phonetics), and 2 where the texts use the term for both the phonetic meaning and the diacritic. – Uanfala (talk) 12:13, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Also commonly refers to a diacritic, stress, or (type of) tone, which get more pageviews. Nardog (talk) 09:09, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Nardog, et al. The term accent is ambiguous even within linguistics.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:20, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose since at the least, Diacritic is also a contender for the primary topic spot. Steel1943  (talk) 06:33, 1 March 2023 (UTC)