Swedish Upper-Secondary Students’ Attitudes Toward African American Vernacular English

Sammanfattning

This study examines how Swedish upper-secondary students evaluate African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in comparison with a Southern White American English (SWAE) accent and how these attitudes relate to motivation and perceived classroom appropriateness. While previous research in Sweden has largely focused on learners’ preferences for “standard” varieties such as General American and Standard Southern British English, little attention has been paid to racialised vernaculars, despite the growing global visibility of AAVE through music, film and social media. Drawing on work on standard language ideologies and language attitudes, the study explores how Swedish learners position two Southern U.S. accents that are historically intertwined yet unequally valued. The data come from a verbal guise experiment with 48 students enrolled in English 6–7 at a Swedish upper-secondary school. Participants listened to two one-minute recordings of spontaneous speech by middle-aged women from Mississippi: one using a SWAE accent and one using AAVE accent. After each recording, students rated the speaker on seven semantic-differential scales targeting status-related and solidarity-related traits, and then answered comparative questions about which accent they found more appropriate, more motivating, and more suitable for inclusion in teaching materials. Results show that the SWAE accent received significantly more positive status evaluations (e.g. educated, clear), while solidarity ratings (e.g. friendly, likeable) were broadly similar across accents. A clear majority of students preferred the SWAE accent for classroom use and representation in teaching materials. The findings indicate that Swedish learners reproduce institutional hierarchies of English varieties by granting greater educational legitimacy to a SWAE variety than to AAVE, even though both speakers in the study are from the U.S. South. The study contributes to debates on linguistic justice in English education by showing how standard language ideology and perceived classroom appropriateness intersect in the Swedish school context.