Accent Change without Face-to-Face Interaction among University Students during Covid-19: The Role of Technologically Mediated Communication

This chapter explores the potential for accent change as a consequence of technologically mediated communication in the speech of university students who completed their first year of studying when all teaching events were scheduled online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We present detailed case studies for three speakers, comparing monophthong and consonant ((L), (T), (ING)) productions across the three terms of the 2020/21 academic year. We find evidence of intra-speaker linguistic variation across the year for the two students who reported regular and new social contact with other students since commencing university, whether this included in-person, face-to-face contact or was mediated through video sharing technology. In contrast, the student who maintained his existing social networks and indicated limited social contact with new speakers exhibited very limited intra-speaker variation across the year. We relate the observed degree and target of accent change to the participants’ ideological positioning and sense of identity and, crucially, their patterns of social interaction and dialect contact. It seems that accent variation and change in an individual’s speech is possible provided they encounter new forms of linguistic variation, including through technologically mediated communication without the need for in-person, face-to-face interaction.