Sounding ‘native’: The impact of gender, identity, and peer groups on second language pronunciation

By Jette Hansen Edwards

Why do some second language (L2) learners attain a native-like pronunciation in the L2 while others have a noticeable foreign accent? More than six decades of research has sought to answer this question, with much of this research focusing on the role of the learner’s first language (L1); this is referred to as L1 transfer and is widely accepted to have a significant influence on L2 pronunciation development. If a learner pronounces that as dat, or three as free, for example, the pronunciation has often been viewed as lack of acquisition and an L2 error, stemming at least in part from transfer from the L1.

Over the past few decades, however, there has been increasing acknowledgement that L2 learning is a social practice embedded within the various L1 and L2 communities in which the language learner is a member or seeks membership, and that the language learner has agency: Rather than being a passive recipient of the L2, the learner is an active agent in constructing an L2 (gendered) identity and community membership through linguistic choices – through how they choose to sound when they speak the L2. A key finding is that not all L2 learners aim for a native or standard accent in the L2.

Saying dat rather than that, or swimmin’ rather than swimming, for example, may not indicate that learners have not acquired a correct or standard pronunciation, but rather that learners are targeting the speech markers in use by the social groups in which they have membership. Research on Puerto Rican immigrants in New York, for example, has shown that some learners target non-standard features of the L2, such as ‘d’ to pronounce that as dat, because this non-standard feature is in use among the members of the African American peer group network to which they wish to belong; rather than being a lack of acquisition or a speech error, the use of ‘d’ may be a conscious choice to signal membership in this community. Conversely, learners may actively avoid or resist using the more standard pronunciation as this may be at odds with the identity they wish to project within this peer network.

It can also indicate a conscious effort to retain features of the L1 when speaking in the L2 in order to signal an L1 and/or multilingual or ethnic identity. Research in Canada, for example, has shown that Francophones may resist using the English ‘th’ sound in that, replacing it with the more French pronunciation as dat, to project a Francophone identity in contrast to an Anglophone identity.

Gender may also impact how the learner sounds when speaking the L2, though not because of innate biological differences between women and men; the longstanding myth that girls are better at learning language than boys, persisting since early research on sex and L2 learning in the 1960s, does not have strong supporting evidence. Instead, gender may impact what is targeted for acquisition: Learners may accommodate to the pronunciation features in wider usage among members of the same gender in their speech community. Research on English has found that among native speakers, women tend to use more prestigious pronunciation features than men when one or more pronunciations exist (saying ‘th’ vs. ‘f’ in three vs. free, for example). When a woman learning the L2 says three while a man learning the L2 says free it is not because the woman is innately endowed with better L2 pronunciation learning abilities; instead, it may be because the woman is targeting the pronunciation that is common among the native speaking women in her social network, such as three, while the man may be targeting free because this is how the other men in his speech community pronounce three.

In sum, the L2 learner may not always aim for a ‘native’ or standard accent: Some learners avoid particular features of the L2, instead using an L1 feature to indicate that they are speakers of an L1 and/or hold a particular ethnicity. Other learners target non-standard features to sound like their peer or social group(s); others adopt the gendered speech norms of their community in order to sound like the men and women within that community.

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This article is part of the Special Issue on Teaching Pronunciation

Article details

Social Factors and the Teaching of Pronunciation: What the Research Tells Us
Jette Hansen Edwards,Ka Long Roy Chan,Toni Lam,Qian Wang
First Published November 12, 2020
DOI: 10.1177/0033688220960897
RELC Journal

About the Author

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Jette G. Hansen Edwards, PhD, is Professor of Applied English Linguistics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her own experiences in learning English at the age of 10, when her family immigrated from Denmark to the United States, has led to a career in Applied English Linguistics, and a research focus on acquisition and use of a second language phonology, world Englishes, and speech intelligibility. She has published widely in these areas, with more than 50 books, journal articles, and book chapters published to date. She is currently working on a book on Social Factors and L2 Phonetics and Phonology to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

Research Interests: Second language phonology, World Englishes (Asian Englishes), impact of mass media on English language learning and use, language variation, peer response in second language writing.