This topic relates to many things I saw as an English teacher in South Korea. Most of the Korean English teachers (themselves ardent students of the language, likely for years and years) generally tended towards a more Anglophilic perspective about the English language, whereas most of the students parent want their children to mater American English (seen there are the international language of business).
In any case, my anecdotal description implies that there are things in motion here, and I suspect that this movement is broader than you might expect (i.e. that the world wants to speak British less than English teachers would like).
Being an Anglophile myself, I find this whole topic to be interesting, and understandable. I also find this to be mostly sad, in that there is a implication in all of this towards advancing an ‘American English’ which is mostly a particular accent covering the very basics of the language. At the same time, American English could become a sort of trading language (hyperbole alert here!), and that the power of the written and spoken word in English could slowly slide towards something like Latin (OK, more hyperbole here, but there is something to this…).
Who is impressed by a British accent?
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/who-is-impressed-by-a-british-accent.html
The main significant effect found in this study was that people who’d lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who’d only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the Standard English one. My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.
Accent attitudes
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/06/accent-attitudes.html
A while ago, I coined the term AVIC (‘American Verbal Inferiority Complex’), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking. Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I’m wondering whether AVIC is on its way out, perhaps mostly found in older generations. Here’s what I found:
In 1985 (see references below), Stewart et al. published a study for which American subjects had been asked to rate the social status of people with standard American or standard British accents. They found that:Speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents’ own (American) accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. For American listeners, this finding contrasts with their reactions to other ethnic accents (p. 103)
But that was more than 25 years ago. And just 10 years ago, Bayard et al. (2001) found that American accents were more positively evaluated in New Zealand and Australia, and America.
