Exploring Stigmatisation of Serbian Dialects: Southerners, Ideologies and Accent Modification

This paper is part of the proceedings from the 15th Newcastle and Northumbria Postgraduate Conference in Language and Linguistics, held at Northumbria University in April 2024. The conference was jointly organised by PhD and MA students from both Northumbria University and Newcastle University. More information about the conference can be found here.The work was presented and authored by Lea Aničić. Lea Aničić is a PhD student of the English Department in the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. During her MA studies, her research centered around phonological processes in contemporary American English and their acquisition by Serbian EFL speakers. Her fields of interest include English and Serbian dialectology, variationist sociolinguistics, phonetics and second language acquisition. She is predominantly interested in the interface between L2 phonological acquisition and language variation.Language attitudes represent a topic that has been largely overlooked in Serbian sociolinguistics. However, a handful of studies that have dealt with this aspect imply that some Serbian varieties might be perceived more negatively than others. Particularly, similar findings were obtained by several authors with regard to the perception of two dialects spoken in the south of Serbia, Kosovo-Resava and Prizren-Timok, and possible stigmatisation of their speakers in areas where a more prestigious variety is spoken. Therefore, this study explores whether attitudes towards some varieties have led to their stigmatisation and cause their speakers to change their linguistic behaviour. To obtain relevant data, we surveyed 724 university students in the two largest Serbian cities. The results confirm the presence of dialect stigmatisation, and most respondents seem to be aware of this issue. Consequentially, accent modification is largely present as well, and it is usually found in speakers of southern varieties; only one fourth of them have kept their natural accent after starting university, while others adjust it to at least some degree. The findings of the study provide valuable information about language attitudes in Serbia and their influence on the perception and linguistic behaviour of speakers from particular areas, which offers groundwork for further research.