Controlled Assessment Draft

Explore the ways your own spoken language is adapted in different situations and how the attitudes of others influences these adaptation.
The way people speak can be influenced by a multitude of factors; be it the environment they grew up in or the people they socialise with. The media, education, class system, location of birth and where I live have directly influenced my personal idiolect.
I was born in Leicester. People in Leicester have a very distinct accent and dialect and during my short period there, I collected many of these features as my own. Ends of sentences would be punctuated with “luv” or “duck” and “good food!” became “bostin’ fittle!” Due to unfortunate circumstances, I was adopted at the age of three and I moved into a completely different society. I was with Southerners. Whereas people from the midlands would talk about “lampin’” the guy that looked at them oddly, down here they would use fancy words like “injunction” and “lawsuit”. I was completely out of my comfort zone. The South has always been associated with wealth and the middle class and me, with my Midlands tendencies, could not adjust for quite a while.
Over time, the accent vanished and I became a proper southern young gentleman. My father speaks with Received Pronunciation, even though he was also born in the Midlands, specifically Rugby. Most of my conversations with my father involve school and progression and most of his statements are declarative. As he is “creative academic”, a phrase he created to explain his job of a Drama examiner, it is expected for him to talk mainly about academia relating to his subject knowledge My mother had a completely different background. She was brought up in a harsh borough of London called White City. She came from a Ghanaian background and her father was the Chief of the Yarboi Tribe. Her father’s family first landed in Liverpool before slowly moving to London. Even with this contrapuntal background, she also talks with RP. She believes that