Ap English Language Interview

Introduction: On October 3rd, at approximately 11:30 p.m., I had the opportunity to interview one of my neighbors whom I will call Alex, in order to keep anonymity. Now, I only have known Alex since the beginning of the year. What I initially learned about her was that her parents immigrated to the United States from Bulgaria; she lived in the United States, specifically Texas, until she was ten years old. Then her family immigrated to England, where they have been living for the last eleven years. For this reason, I concluded that she would be an interesting interviewee when asked about one’s linguistic identity. Needless to say, it would be quite unique in comparison to my own and others that I know around me. Therefore, the main goal

On the other hand, Sally, who is a native born British Speaker, omits the “r” and extends the open-mid, back vowel (line 12). The same goes for the word “what” in which Sally omitted the letter “t” in the word “what” (line 8), which compared to American English speakers, there is no omitting of the “t.” That is why I sounded weird trying to imitate her pronunciation of the word (on the recording my intonation was slightly higher than Sally’s). This is interesting because similar results – the omitting of t’s within British English – has been observed in other research papers such as “Drilling Down to the Grain in Superdiveristy” from Ben Rampton (2015). Witnessing that evidence that has been pointed out in other articles was intriguing. Additionally, it supported Alex’s reasoning concerning her linguistic identity because she did not want to fake a British accent by asking a native-born, British English speaker to give a demonstration rather than