Description
In 2021, 2.4% of the 17 million inhabitants of the Netherlands were people with a Moroccan migration background. While the socio-political climate in the Netherlands was initially conducive to welcoming non-European migrant laborers, the 9/11 attacks and the upsurge of populist right-wing politics engendered explicit racism, as indexed by overt accent prejudice (Grondelaers et al. 2015).Below the surface of these explicit attitudes, however, Moroccan accent evaluations are much more complex and diverse. Matched-guise experiments probing both traditional prestige perceptions (pertaining to education, income, competence,…) and modern prestige considerations (pertaining to non-posh urban cool) demonstrated that while it is Moroccan-Dutch males who take the brunt of accent-based racism, they are not categorically rejected: Moroccan-flavored speech is always deemed inferior to indigenous speech, but it is found to be the most dynamically prestigious of all Dutch speech (Grondelaers & Van Gent 2019). Female Moroccan speech does not engender such extreme reactions, but it is a long way from being accepted as indigenous speech (Grondelaers & Van Gent 2022).
In this talk, I discuss two follow-up marketing experiments designed to discover the limits of Moroccan accent prestige. The first featured two television commercials, one for a gentleman’s dress shoe, one for an urban sneaker; commercials were played with a slogan produced in either a Randstad accent or a Moroccan accent. The second experiment featured audio commercials for newly created university colleges presented in weaker and broader, male and female, endogenous and Moroccan accents.
While these experiments significantly enhance our knowledge about ethnic accents, it remains difficult to account for the null findings, viz. to determine whether the absence of a predicted effect is an empirical or a methodological failure. This paper therefore makes a plea for the triangulation and the constant replication of experimental attitude data.
| Period | 13 Dec 2023 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Northumbria University, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |