My Idiolect by Eleanor Williams
It is quite difficult to define what my idiolect is exactly. This is because my spoken language depends on where I am, how I am feeling and who I am speaking to, such as social groups, multiplex's and regional groups. However, there are a lot of features of my idiolect which distinguish me as a person, making my voice different and more recognizable individually to my audience, no matter who I am talking to or how I am feeling.
My accent is influenced greatly from where me and my family around me come from. Because my family are French and come from Calais, I can sometimes have a different style of speech to those who are English speakers. Although I can speak fluent English, it is my accent that can be quite different at times. Although the French language can be quite similar to the English language in ways, the phonology tends to be more consistent of fricatives rather than harsh sounds like plosives which the English tend to use more. For example, whilst the English say /ch/ I say /sh/, so instead of saying 'chocolate' i say 'shocolate'. this is because I was taught to read with flowing expression through received English, so i would read and say the words how they were written and say them in almost old English, making the words flow and sound more poetic. This was also affected by my mother who tended to have a nasally accent and used quieter fricatives rather than loud plosives. Once I had moved to England on the other hand, I started to learn to pronounce every phoneme because of the stereotype of the English language being 'posh' and of high prestige, meaning I never dropped my 't's and still don't to this day.
My idiolect is then also affected by a lot of different things on top of being geographically different, such as things like the media, jobs I have had, my friends and my places of education. For example from the internet I have gotten phrases such as shortenings much like 'wtf', 'ty', 'brb' and 'lol' which i have ended up saying as part of my speech too, no matter how hard I try to avoid it. I also tend to use 'like' and 'literally' excessively in sentences as fillers for when I am interrupted or not sure what to say. As well as this, I have included code shifting into my idiolect because of the different jobs I have had in the past. This is due to face threatening acts (FTA) and politeness when addressing a customer (the more polite you are the more likely you are to get money from it, because being rude is an expectancy these days). This means that I have started using 'ty' when around my friends and family but 'please' and 'thank you' when at work.
My family background also influences my idiolect. For example, I call my mother 'mumma' when I am with my family and then 'mum' when I am with my friends. Some words such as taboo language aren't allowed to be used inside the house (by me) as far as I know, because of the face value behind the words and the intent that could be behind them, these include things like saying 'shit' or 'fuck' when accidentally stubbing your toe on the lounge cabinet. On the other hand, I do tend to use quite a lot of blasphemy recently such as 'Jesus Christ' when I am shocked at something, but I never use 'oh my god' unless it really is a dire situation as I prefer to use 'oh my gosh'. Sometimes I will use French phrases to say good morning or thank you, especially when talking to my mother, I will say 'bonjour' and 'merci beaucoup'. As well as this, because I am very interested in the Japanese language, I tend to use lexis from there too, such as yes and thank you, 'hai' and 'arigato', but these tend to be to only very close family members or friends. If I am happy I tend to use this variety of language in my informal speech.
