English has become the foremost global language of communication, functioning as a lingua franca for people all over the world. Because of this function as a transnational lingua franca, the majority of English interactions in the world today involve only non-native speakers of English (Crystal 2003, Graddol 2006). The status of English in the world is consequently not only characterised by its native speakers, but increasingly by those who use it as a second or later language (Kirkpatrick 2010). This developing status of English has considerable educational implications, especially for the teaching of spoken English. Learners of English need to understand and make themselves understood to speakers with various first language backgrounds in linguistic encounters with various purposes. Applied linguists argue that near-native pronunciation is unattainable for most L2 learners and that explicit instruction of pronunciation cannot eliminate foreign accent (Derwing & Munro 2005). Moreover, the status of English as a lingua franca challenges the idea of one correct model of pronunciation for learners (Jenkins, 2006). This linguistic reality calls for research on the actual use of English by non-native speakers, including the intelligibility of their pronunciation, and the utilization of such research in teacher education and in the development of policy documents.

In Norway, research on spoken English shows that adolescent learners avoid native accents of English as target pronunciations, because imitating a native accent (such as, e.g., RP) means signalling the cultures and qualities of these accents (Rindal, 2013). Norwegian adolescents refer to English as a personal language and express a desire to use their own pronunciation of English (Rindal, 2014). However, classroom practices related to spoken language are often informed by ideas of correctness and standard language ideologies (Hornberger & McKay, 2010); knowledge about non-native speaker English language use is limited, and teachers are often hesitant to abandon native-speaker models. In the English school subject in Norway, the mandate is primarily to teach students to communicate in English (KD, 2013), and intelligibility of spoken English is therefore a chief concern for teachers. It is therefore relevant to ask how intelligible Norwegians’ pronunciation of English is, and whether any evaluations of it will hinder communication. The main aim of the study reported here is toinvestigate the intelligibility of different degrees of Norwegian-accented English and listeners’ attitudes towards speakers with such accents.

Previous research exploring how listeners evaluate non-native pronunciation compared to (near-)native-speaker pronunciation has produced tentative results. Standard native-speaker accents are often preferred by both native and non-native listeners, especially related to the perceived status of the speaker (Beinhoff 2013, McKenzie 2006, Nejjari et al. 2012, Xu, Wang & Case 2010). However, recognition is increasingly given to L1-accented English (McKenzie 2006, Xu, Wang & Case 2010), in particular among non-native speakers (Hendriks, Meurs & Groot 2015) and in particular when the accent is not very strong (Beinhoff 2013, Hendriks, et al., 2015). Conversely, non-native speakers seem to have more concerns and are more self-conscious about their own accent than about other non-native speaker accents (Derwing, 2003). This seems also to be the case in Norway, where Norwegian-accented English spoken by profiled politicians has been ridiculed in Norwegian media, but not even mentioned in international commentary (Hordnes, 2013). It is therefore relevant to investigate how Norwegian-accented English is perceived by non-Norwegians, and especially by other non-native speakers of English since they are the mostly likely to participate in English interactions with Norwegian learners.

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