The relationship between cultural identity and accent

This study investigates the relationship between cultural identity and accent. The focus is on the relationship between the identity perceptions of 20 native speakers of English, who have been living in Turkey for a long period of time, and their Turkish accent in terms of nativelikeness. The participants were administered a cultural identity questionnaire, their reading aloud of a few Turkish passages was recorded, and followup interviews were conducted with four of the participants. The findings of this study showed that there is a relationship between cultural identity and accent, in the sense that the more the participants identified themselves as Turkish the more ‘native-like’ their accent score was. This finding confirms the previous literature (e.g., Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Magid, 2005; Jones, 2001; Marx, 2002; Rindal, 2010), suggesting a relationship between cultural identity and accent. The findings further indicated that the participants tended to prioritize comprehensibility over presentation of speech. At the pedagogical level, this is a reminder that during their practices, second language teachers need to be aware of the language learners’ goals in order to avoid mismatches.