Resumen de ‘City harsh’ and ‘the welsh version of RP’: Some ways in which teachers view dialects of welsh English

Peter Garret, Nikolas Coupland, ANGIE WILLIAMS

• This paper summarises some of the findings from a project in progress which researches teachers’ sociolinguistic awareness in Wales. A questionnaire was sent to secondary teachers all over Wales to investigate their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, geographical varieties of Welsh English. They were asked to draw in what they felt to be the main Welsh English dialect regions on a blank map of Wales, and then to label and characterise these regions in their own words. They were also asked to complete semantic differential scales for a number of conceptually presented varieties. In the scales task, they differentiated the varieties in such a way that each had its own evaluative profile along dimensions of prestige, dynamism, pleasantness, and Welshness, with one variety approximating subjective definition as a standard. The labels and characterisations provided by the teachers often carried highly evaluative content, and differentiated varieties in terms of the quality and relative proportions of comments relating to positive and negative affect, prestige, Welshness, English‐ness, perceived linguistic features etc. Some interesting differences between the labels and scales data are considered, and issues of importance to Language Awareness are highlighted.