Accent Bias: Voices at Work

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In our last blog post, we explored some of the findings of the second part of our study which investigated how the UK public evaluated 5 different accents in mock interviews. The third part of our study, detailed here, investigated whether people in positions of power such as recruiters would exhibit the same type of accent biases. 

Our study focuses on a profession that has been previously described as lacking diversity, Law. We were interested in examining whether accent bias interferes with judgements of professional skill. In other words, would a candidate with, say a Multicultural London English accent, be perceived as less professional or competent as their Received Pronunciation speaking peers? 

To investigate this question, we played the same mock interviews as described in our last blog post to 61 legal professionals.We prepared 10 short mock interview answers, varying between ‘good’ and ‘poor’ quality. Before we conducted the experiment, these answers were independently judged as 'good' or 'poor' by a group of 25 legal professionals otherwise unrelated to the project.

To create the mock interviews, we had 10 speakers (2 of each accent) record 10 good and 10 poor interview responses. This resulted in 100 recordings. The accents we tested were: Multicultural London English (MLE), Estuary English (EE), Received Pronunciation (RP), General Northern English (GNE), and Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE). 

From the 100 recordings, our 61 legal professionals heard a random selection of 10 interview answers. They were then asked to evaluate whether they thought the answer was a 'good' answer or a 'poor' answer. They were asked to indicate this on a 10-point scale, responding to the following questions:

1. “How would you rate the overall quality of the candidate’s answer?”
2. “Does the candidate’s answer show relevant expertise and knowledge?”
3. “In your opinion, how likely is it that the candidate will succeed as a lawyer?”
4. “Is the candidate somebody that you personally would like to work with?”
5. “How likely would you be to recommend hiring this candidate?”

When we analysed our data, we identified a surprising effect. Whilst the general public displayed a great deal of accent bias in judging the competency of a job candidate, the lawyers did not follow this pattern. In fact, the professions did not show significant preferences for Received Pronunciation (RP) or General Northern English (GNE), nor did they show a consistent dispreference for working class or non-white accents. Instead, they showed a consistent ability to judge the quality of an answer as 'good' or 'poor' regardless of the accent the answer was presented to them in. Their answers very closely matched the answers given by the group of professionals who rated the quality of the written answers. 

The graph above shows this effect. The high quality answers are in yellow and the lower quality answers are in green. As you should be able to see, across the five different accents (see the x-axis on the bottom), the ratings remain relatively the same. At the same time, however, it is worth noting that EE & MLE receive the lowest ratings of all the accents. 

Note, however, that RP is also lower rated than some of the other accents. This is surprising given that RP was evaluated as the most prestigious accent in the label study. It's possible that this ranking might be related to the association of RP with a higher level of education, so there is a greater expectation of these individuals. 

It is also interesting to note that some of the social factors seen to effect the general public's responses do not seem to influence the professional's judgements. The age and regional origin of  legal professionals did not affect how they responded to job candidates, unlike what we found among the general public. Their Motivation to Control a Prejudiced Response (MCPR) - a psychological factor that had a strong effect on how listeners behaved in our public survey - also did not effect their ratings. 

Our findings therefore suggest that when legal professionals are asked to judge the suitability of a candidate, they are able to switch off biases and attend very well to the quality of an answer, judging the competency of the individual independently of their accent. 

Of course, however, the current study simulates just one small part of hiring candidates. It doesn't look at accent bias in other aspects of professional life, like informal interaction during the interview or everyday experiences on the job. So, it's possible that accent bias might influence the candidate's progression later on down the line. 

At least in terms of hiring though, it looks like it's relatively good news for speakers of regional and 'non-standard' accents! 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Accent Bias: Responses to Voices

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In the most recent blog post, we explored the findings of the first part of our study which investigated attitudes to accent labels. The second part of our study, detailed here, investigated how people responded to recordings of speakers with different accents to see if the same accent bias exists in speech. 

To examine these questions, we recorded 10 speakers of 5 different accents (2 speakers each). These accents were Multicultural London English (MLE), Estuary English (EE), Received Pronunciation (RP), General Northern English (GNE), and Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE). Speakers of these accents were recorded reading scripted mock interview answers. 

These recordings were then played to over 1,100 participants aged between 18-79 from across the country. The sample of participants was balanced for both ethnicity and gender. 

For each of the 10 mock interview answers the participants heard, they were asked to evaluate the candidate's performance, knowledge, suitability, and hireability for a job. Participants were asked to rate the candidate on a 10-point scale - where 10 is the highest. They were asked to respond to questions such as:

1. “How would you rate the overall quality of the candidate's answer?”
2. “Does the candidate's answer show expert knowledge?”
3. “How likely is it that the candidate will succeed as a lawyer?”
4. “Is the candidate somebody that you personally would like to work with?”
5. “How would you rate the candidate overall?”

The participants also provided information on their age, social background, and education. 

When we analysed the results, we found a significant effect of the listener's age. Older listeners generally rated the two southern accents (MLE and EE) lower than all of the other accents. Younger participants, however, did not show this pattern. 

You can see this effect in the graph below. On the right are the older participants and on the left, the younger participants. The higher the line, the more positive the evaluation. As one can see, the ratings drop when you move from the younger respondents to their older peers. 

Is accent bias decreasing or is this just 'age-grading'?

This could mean one of two things. It could be that general attitudes to accents are changing, such that younger listeners will continue to exhibit the same accent preferences later on in life. On the other hand, it's possible that this could be evidence of age-grading. This is where young people might be more tolerant of accent diversity in their early years but become more critical as they get older.

A second finding of this study was that people's evaluations of accents in the responses to the interview questions depends on the type of question being answered. In questions that require a degree of technical or specialist knowledge, like those questions which asked specific details about law, all accents were rated more favourably. In more general questions, such as those which asked personal details or the work experience of the candidate, the accents were downrated much more.

Degree of expertise and accent rating

The effect of the 'expertise' required is shown in the graph above. The yellow line indicates 'expert' answers and the green line indicates 'non-expert' answers. As you should be able to see, all accents are rated much lower when the answer is a 'non-expert' answer than for an 'expert' answer. 

We also asked participants a series of questions aimed to test how prejudiced they were. We proposed that the more prejudiced people were, the lower their ratings of the different accents would be. In fact, this is exactly what we find. See the graph below. 

More prejudiced listeners were more likely to downrate all of the accents  

Those who reported they were more likely to be prejudiced towards different accents showed much lower ratings than those who were more likely to control their prejudice. The graph above shows ratings depending on MCPR (Motivation to Control a Prejudice Response). The blue line is those who reported that they are not prejudiced towards different accents, whereas the green line is those who report exhibiting more prejudice. 

What these results suggest is that there is a a systematic bias against certain accents in England (particularly Southern working-class varieties), whereas RP is evaluated much more positively and is perceived to be the most suitable for professional employment.

However, these results are reported for the general public. Would we see the same types of evaluations amongst those who are responsible for hiring candidates? In the next blog post, we explore this question. In the meantime, you can find our more about the project by visiting the project website. 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Accent Bias: Responses to Accent Labels

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In the first part of our study, we replicated Coupland & Bishop's study (2007, summarised in an earlier blog post) to see whether the accent attitudes that people held 12 years ago still persist today. A similar study was conducted by Giles in 1970, giving us a further time point to compare our results.

We recruited a sample of over 800 participants aged between 18 and 79 via a market research firm. The group of participants was intended to be a representative sample of the UK population, so was balanced for gender and region (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and included all major ethnicity groups.

Once participants had been recruited, they were asked to respond to 38 British accent 'labels', such as 'Estuary English', 'Received Pronunciation', 'Multicultural British English', and 'Birmingham English'. You can listen to some of these accents here. The participants were asked to rate each accent label on a scale of 1-7 - where 1 is the lowest and 7 is the highest - for the prestige and pleasantness of the accent.

After they had completed the survey, we collected social information about the participant, including their gender, ethnicity, age, region of origin, highest level of education, occupation, English accent, languages spoken. We also asked them to complete a short questionnaire about their exposure to different UK accents, the diversity of their own social networks, their beliefs about bias in Britain, and respond to a series of questions designed to measure how much they were concerned about being perceived as prejudiced.

As the image above shows, when compared with Giles' results in 1969, Coupland and Bishop's results in 2004, our findings (2019) demonstrate that whilst there are some minor differences, overall, attitudes to accents in the UK remain fairly stable. Standard accents, such as Received Pronunciation (RP) remain very highly rated, whereas ethnic and urban accents, such as Birmingham English, are rated much less favourably. These findings appear to be stable across the three time points.

Want to replicate this study? 

We've developed a series of Language Investigations and Teaching Units that helps students and teachers develop a research project of their own! Head over to Teach Real English! to access these resources.  

However, all is not lost it seems. Although we see similar patterns across the three studies, we do see a gradual improvement in the ratings of the accents that are rated the lowest (Afro-Caribbean, Liverpool, Indian, Birmingham). In fact, our 2019 study reports quite the improvement in overall ratings of these accents. It's therefore possible that people view these accents much more positively than they did 50 years ago.

However, this study examines only responses to 'accent labels'. What would we find if we played actual audio recordings of these accents to participants? Would we see the same results? In the next blog post, we introduce the findings from the second part of our study. In the meantime, you can find our more about the project by visiting the project website. 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

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There ain’t nowt wrong with accents

What do you think of when you hear someone speak with a Brummie accent? How about when somebody speaks with a West Country accent? Do you think that some accents are more attractive or prestigious than others? If so, it’s possible that your judgements of these accents are influenced by accent bias.

As part of the Accent Bias project led by academics at Queen Mary University of London and the University of York, over the next few weeks we’ll be uploading a series of Digest posts that discuss the effects of accent bias.

In the first post of the series, we focus on a 2007 study by Nikolas Coupland and Hywel Bishop that investigated how people perceive different types of British accents, looking specifically at whether some accents were evaluated more positively than others.

Credit: https://www.voices.com/blog/quiz-british-slang-uk-colloquilisms/

In their 2007 study, they report on a BBC survey that collected 5010 respondents’ evaluations of 34 different accents. To assess these evaluations, they created an online survey where participants where asked a series of questions about the prestige and pleasantness of the 34 accents. This included asking participants direct questions such as “How much prestige do you think is associated with this accent?”, and “How pleasant do you think this accent sounds?”. The participants rated their judgements electronically via a digital survey by clicking a seven-point rating scale, where 1 is low rating whilst 7 is high rating. This is what is referred to as a 'label study' in that participants were not asked to listen to a recording of the accent, but were simply asked to respond to different accent 'labels', such as 'Asian English' or 'Southern Irish'.

Participants also were asked to indicate where in the UK they were from, how old they were, and their gender. The researchers also asked a series of questions about whether the respondent liked hearing different accents to test whether their attitudes towards accents and dialects influenced their ratings of the different accent labels. 

Coupland and Bishop find that, for social attractiveness, accents such as Standard English, Southern Irish, and Scottish are generally positively evaluated, whilst accents such as Birmingham, South African, and Glasgow were typically down-rated – that is, they score much lower. For prestige, however, they observe a slightly different pattern. Received Pronunciation (or the ‘Queen’s English’) scores much higher in terms of prestige than it does for social attractiveness. Whilst accents such as Birmingham and Asian English score poorly across the two different scales.

Interestingly, accents such as Southern Irish English, Newcastle English and Afro-Caribbean English are rated far higher for attractiveness than for prestige, whereas London English, North American-accented English, South African-accented English and German-accented English are all ranked higher for prestige than for attractiveness.

Whilst these ratings reveal more general trends of the social evaluation of different UK accents, Coupland and Bishop suggest that these evaluations may be influenced by the respondents' social characteristics, such as whether they are male or female. Focusing just on ‘prestige’, on the whole, Coupland and Bishop find that women are more likely to evaluate a given accent as prestigious than men. They also find that where the respondent is based in the UK appears to play a role in their evaluation of a given accent, with participants more likely to evaluate in-group accents as more favourable than others. In other words, Scottish speaking participants were more likely to evaluate Scottish accents more positively than respondents from other parts of the country. Similarly, they also observe that the respondents’ age is likely to influence their evaluation, with the oldest age group tending to show a preference for their own accents than all other groups. Lastly, they observe that the more liberally-minded respondents who indicate that they appreciate accent variation were more likely to rate non-standard accents as more prestigious than their peers. 

So, what does this all mean? Well, Coupland and Bishop note several implications of this study. The first is that language use is influenced by ideology – that is a widespread system of ideas and values that governs a particular concept or social issue. For instance, they observe that there is a general tendency to rate ethnically linked accents (Asian and Afro-Caribbean) and some of the urban vernaculars (Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow) as lower in prestige and attractiveness than non-ethnically linked and rural accents. They argue that this is because there is a widespread belief that people should ‘speak properly’ and so accents that are further away from more ‘standard’ varieties are typically perceived to be less attractive and less prestigious than ones that are closer to the standard.

Whilst these findings may not at first seem very encouraging for speakers of non-standard varieties, Coupland and Bishop suggest it seems that there is seems to be a shift towards embracing more liberal attitudes towards accent variation, with younger respondents and those claiming that they like hearing different accents more likely to evaluate non-standard varieties as more prestigious and more socially attractive. So, it seems that although some people might think of certain accents as more attractive or prestigious than others, perceptions are gradually changing. 

Given the fourteen or so years since Coupland and Bishop conducted their study, it’s worth considering whether this liberal outlook has continued. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be focusing on the Accent Bias in Britain project which, among other questions, sought to investigate this issue. In the meantime, or more information on the project, you can visit the Accent Bias in Britain homepage. You can also find further educational resources, including a Language Investigation and a Teaching Unit on our Teach Real English! website.

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Coupland, Nikolas & Hywel Bishop (2007) Ideologised values for British accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11 (1):74-93.



This summary was written by Christian Ilbury
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00311.x

Accent on accent

image of Language Diversity from Tobias Mikkelson
http://www.tobiasmik.dk

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him" wrote George Bernard Shaw in his preface to Pygmalion. He was, of course, referring to the way people evaluate accents and make (usually negative) judgements about speakers.

When we talk about accent, it is important to remember that this relates only to pronunciation and intonation rather than grammar or vocabulary. Thus, two people speaking the same language, who use the same grammar and word choices will give different cues about their social and regional origins, ethnic group membership or class. While we, as listeners, naturally pick up these cues about people’s ethnic, socioeconomic and geographical background, experimental research has shown that listeners can also make judgements on others’ intelligence, warmth and even height just by listening to recorded accented speech.

Although Shaw was referring primarily to British English accents in a class-oriented society, many studies from the UK, USA and Australia from the past six decades all show that foreign accented speech is negatively evaluated by native speakers of a language. People who view their own group or culture as the centre of everything, and who scale and rate all other groups with reference to it, can be said to be ethnocentric. Ethnocentric people tend to strongly identify with people in their own group and are biased against outsiders.

James Neuliep and Kendall Speten-Hansen hypothesised that there would be significant negative correlations between ethnocentrism and the way speakers with non-native accents are socially perceived. To test this, they recruited 93 male and female undergraduate students and randomly assigned 46 of them to an experimental group and 47 to a control group. All participants were native speakers of English.

In the experiment, participants in both groups completed a Generalized Ethnocentrism scale test to see how ethnocentric they were. This included rating on a 5-point scale items such as ‘‘My culture should be the role model for the world’’ and ‘‘I have little respect for the values and customs of other cultures’’.

Then, both groups watched a video of the same male speaker talking for 12 minutes about a non-controversial topic – the benefits of exercise. The videos were identical in every way except for the accent of the speaker. In the film viewed by the experimental group, the speaker had a non-native accent, and in order to try and reduce stereotypical judgments, this accent was left ambiguous, with no detectable regional, ethnic, or national associations. The speaker viewed by the control group spoke with a standard American accent. In both videos, the speaker wore the same clothes, spoke in the same location, at the same pace, and used the same number of gestures.

After viewing the video, participants were asked to complete tasks designed to assess their perception of how attractive the speaker was, and how credible and like themselves he was.

To rate speaker credibility, participants used 7-point semantic scales including scales asking about expertise (for example, a scale between “Qualified” and “Unqualified”) and character (for example, scales such as ‘‘Reliable-Unreliable’’ and ‘‘Honest-Dishonest’’).

Speaker attractiveness was assessed using 7-point scales testing for social, physical, and task attraction. The latter refers to the perception that someone is competent, trained, and qualified to perform a job. To assess attractiveness, participants had to rate items such as ‘‘I think he could be a friend of mine’’, ‘‘I find him physically attractive’’ and ‘‘I have confidence in his ability to get the job done’’.

Perceived homophily (how like the participant the speaker was judged to be) was also assessed by a 7-point semantic scale, where participants were asked to rate items such as ‘‘The Speaker is: Like me-Unlike me’’ and ‘‘The Speaker is: Of similar status to me-of different status to me’’.

As predicted, for the experimental group ethnocentrism was negatively and significantly correlated with perceptions of the speaker’s physical, social, and task attractiveness, his credibility, and perceived homophily. Moreover, this bias is not binary but continuous; the more ethnocentric a participant was, the lower their ratings of the non-native accented speaker’s attractiveness, credibility, and homophily. However, when presented with a speaker with a standard American accent, ethnocentrism played little to no role in the way that the speaker was socially perceived.

The findings are important because previous research has shown that credibility, attractiveness and homophily are three of the most significant social perceptions we make about others, affecting the interpretation of what a person says.  What a non-native speaker is interpreted as saying, then, can depend on the ethnocentricity of their interlocutor.

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Neuliep, James W. & Kendall M. Speten-Hansen (2013) The influence of ethnocentrism on social perceptions of nonnative accents. Language & Communication 33:167–176

doi.10.1016/j.langcom.2013.05.001

This summary was written by Danniella Samos

‘Researches’, ‘informations’ and ‘knowledges’ in World Englishes

The spread of English across the world has been viewed in terms of three concentric circles, which are traditionally referred to as the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles.  The Inner Circle (IC) refers to countries where English is viewed as a native language, often considered the ‘traditional’ bases of English: the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Outer Circle (OC) refers to countries to which English spread as a result of colonialism such as India and parts of Asia and Africa. Here, English has been institutionalised in educational, political and judicial systems and is a second language to many of its speakers.  The Expanding Circle (EC) is where English is a foreign language which is considered important to learn in its international, business and digital capacity. As English becomes more widely used in an international context, linguists have simultaneously become more interested in documenting what is happening to variation in its usage across the three circles.

One way of doing this is by studying the use of uncountable nouns.  These include advice, knowledge, milk and information and are traditionally described as nouns that we literally can’t count and therefore have no -s to make them plural, as opposed to the countable nouns chair(s), book(s), pen(s) or apple(s) for example. The ‘incorrect’ use of these uncountable nouns has long been cited as one of the main differences between native IC speakers of English and those in the OC and EC, who have more of a tendency to pluralize them (as advices and milks for example).  

Christopher Hall, Daniel Schmidtke and Jamie Vickers decided to study this assumed distinction more closely with a view to seeing whether there was any variation in uncountable noun usage between the outer and expanding circles. To do this they extracted their data from two main resources.  The first was the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English, or VOICE, a spoken language database which contains just over one million words from non-native European English speakers.  The second was the World Wide Web, a fantastic resource for research into international varieties of English, especially as it’s full of ‘ill-formed’ language that prescriptive linguists really don’t like, just perfect for this study! By using the advanced settings of the Google search engine, Hall, Schmidtke and Vickers were able to search OC domains like Malta (.mt) and Hong Kong (.hk) and EC domains like Thailand (.th) and Iceland (.ic).  They scoured both VOICE and the WWW for examples of the ‘incorrect’ plural forms of uncountable nouns.

They found that the pluralisation of mass nouns was actually pretty uncommon, although obviously more frequent than native IC Englishes where it is almost entirely absent.  They also found that where uncountable nouns were used in the plural form, it was across a range of mainly OC settings.  This was a curious finding since we would expect speakers in countries where English is an official, widely-used  second language to use it more ‘correctly’ or at least more in line with native speakers of the IC.  

However, the researchers deduced that it may in fact be this notion of ‘correctness’ that is influencing the results.  In EC settings, English is formally taught and learnt as a foreign language and these speakers’ reliance on formal language and grammar rules, something the researchers describe as their ‘post-learner status’, could be directly influencing the results.

Hall, Schmidtke and Vickers are keen to point out that, although frequent when compared to IC Englishes, plural forms of uncountable nouns are unlikely to emerge as new forms in OC or EC Englishes as overall they are quite infrequent, and this usage probably doesn’t warrant as much ‘fuss’ and attention as prescriptive linguists have given it in the past. 

Nothing like some good researches to expand our knowledges, don’t you think?

Hall, Christopher J., Schmidtke, Daniel and Vickers, Jamie (2013) Countability in world Englishes. World Englishes 32 (1): 1-22.

doi: 10.1111/weng.12001

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

‘Throve’ and ‘dove’ or ‘thrived’ and ‘dived’? Let’s call the whole thing off!

At first, trying to explain the formation of the past tense in English may seem simple – you just add –-ed, don’t you? So that walk becomes walked and help becomes helped, right?  Correct! ... for ‘regular’ verbs.  Unfortunately, there are also many ‘irregular’ verbs like eat (ate) and stand (stood) that do not easily fit into this pattern.  In a logical world, we would expect language to regularize over time and this is true of some verbs – helped was hulpon in Old English. However, some regular past tense forms have actually become irregular – for example, mean > meant.

Lieselotte Anderwald investigated this phenomenon in British and American English.  These two varieties have developed their own national features and peculiarities over time and Anderwald was curious to see if this had happened with irregular past tense forms.  She concentrated on three verbs which have been recorded in both regular and irregular forms.  These are throve vs. thrived, dove vs. dived and plead vs. pled.  She searched a digital database or ‘corpus’ of 400 million American English words called Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to find occurrences of these irregular past tense forms from as far back as 1810. She also searched the British National Corpus (BNC), containing over 100 million words from British English so that she could compare her findings. Then, she consulted her own Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars (CNG), containing 258 British and North American Grammar Books published during the 19^th century, to see if linguists were recommending a particular usage of these verb forms.

Although throve was the main past tense form used during the nineteeth century, it declined rapidly in use from 1910 onwards and seems to have regularized so that American users now only use thrived.  However, British English still uses throve at times.  American English appears to be leading British English by several decades in this regularization process.  In a completely opposite way, the irregular form dove is becoming more irregular in American English.  In fact, dove is used as much as dived in modern American usage today (50% of the time), unlike in British English where it is used just 1% of the time. The irregular form pled also seems to be a new form which has emerged during the twentieth century in American English, although in both varieties it is used very infrequently and mainly in legal contexts.

With this data in mind, Anderwald consulted the CNG.  In the case of thrived vs. throve the American  nineteenth century grammars permitted a lot of variation in usage and started to endorse thrived from the middle of the century, whereas the British Grammars appeared to strongly favour the use of throve. It is hard to know whether these American Grammars were just describing what they observed happening to this verb form or whether their recommendations were in some way influential in the change actually taking place.  Dove was rarely acknowledged as an irregular verb in any of the grammars consulted and dived was the only form accepted.  This is interesting considering how widely used it now is in American English and its lack of acknowledgment in grammars does not seem to have influenced the emergence of this irregular form.  Pled was only mentioned in twelve grammar books, ten of them from America and just two from Britain.  There was a rise in its inclusion in verb tables in  grammars of the 1860s, so that children would have learnt plead-pled-pled by heart.  Looking at her data from COHA, Anderwald noticed that there was a small rise in usage of pled in the 1870s which may have been caused by the generation of 1860 using it in their adult writing: a very small example of prescriptive influence maybe?  If this is so, it is probably because plead was (and is) so infrequent that users needed to consult a grammar book, whereas a more frequently used word is much better entrenched in the memory and therefore perhaps less influenced by grammarians. 

The differences Anderwald found between these changing irregular forms shows how two varieties of the same language can grow, develop and change in different ways. This is what makes language an integral part of a national character and grammarians may only minimally affect this.  Language will develop in its own way and won’t be restrained by rules…in fact sometimes it will even break them – obviously what throve throve to do!

Anderwald, Lieselotte (2013) Natural language change or prescriptive influence? Throve, dove, pled, drug and snuck in 19th-century American English. English World-Wide 34:2 (2013), 146–176.

doi 10.1075/eww.34.2.02

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle