Accentedness Isn'T Abnormal Speech; It'S a Badge of Identity

This research is on foreign accents. The researcher-authoranon-native fluent English speaker discovered through a lit-reviewthat all people speak in accent. This research focused on attitudinalself-accented speech perceptions of Kisii-Kenyans in the USA andfurther investigated what North American English (NAE) speakersperceptions are toward the Kisii-Kenyan accentedness. Two groupsparticipated in this study. First, college educated Kisii-Kenyan adults,and second, NAE speakers participated in the study. A likert scale typeof questionnaire was used to collect data from the first group and wasanalyzed for result. The second group listened to speech clips fromtwo Kisii-Kenyan volunteers and hence assessed their accentednessand intelligibility. The findings revealed Kisii-Kenyans perceptionsof themselves as confident and positive in their accented Englishspeech. On the American perceptions it is not conclusive, and theassessments do not reveal any validity of judging Kisii-Kenyans asincomprehensible and unintelligible.