Experimental study of attitudes towards varieties of Swahili and English spoken in Nairobi, SOAS
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2017-11-20

This seminar titled "A ‘Matched Guise Test’ experimental study of attitudes towards varieties of Swahili and English spoken in Nairobi" was given by Chege Githiora (SOAS) on 14 November 2017 at the Department of Linguistics, SOAS University of London.
You can find out more about this seminar at https://goo.gl/r6i8mF

Language attitudes are culturally informed, and they can congeal into stereotypes. People develop the ability to identify a language, and make associations which are derived from the surrounding environment, culture and society. In order to test this hypothesis in Nairobi, I conducted a ‘Matched Guise Test’ which is a widely known sociolinguistic experimental technique used to determine the true feelings of an individual or community towards a specific language, dialect, or accent (Lambert et al, 1960). It is used to identify language or dialect attitudes (see for example, Shuy and Fasold 1973, etc), and there have been numerous variations to this test. In this seminar, I shall present the results of this experiment to explore attitudes of a test group of Nairobians towards various ways of speaking Kenyan English, and non-standard varieties of Swahili spoken by non-native speakers.