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November 27, 2020 - 8:30am
“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him” — George Bernard Shaw’s famous line from Pygmalion was always my mum’s theory for why British TV and radio is always full of Irish people (like herself). Celtic accents are outside England’s class system of resentment, distrust and competitive disadvantage, and so put people at ease.
That the wrong accent can be a huge disadvantage is a truism featuring in countless plays and novels, and is as old as time. The Shibboleth of the Bible indicates how pronunciation could be deadly in identifying an out-group, a pattern that has repeated down the years, and as recently as the Lebanese Civil war.
But if something is a disadvantage, then the thinking goes that there must be remedy, and accentism — or “la glottophobie” — is coming before France’s National Assembly next Thursday, the proposal making it illegal to discriminate against regional ways of talking.
France has very distinct and strong regional accents — noticeable even to non-French speakers — but until the 20th century the majority of its citizens did not even speak French. When the Virgin Mary visited St Bernadette, she is recalled telling her Qué soï era inmaculado councepcioũ — “I am the Immaculate Conception” — which is clearly not French.
Lourdes would have been beyond provincial back then, but even today “having a regional accent in France means automatically that you’re treated like a hick — amiable but fundamentally unserious,” according the bill’s sponsor Christophe Euzet, from Perpignan.
The law might seem silly, but there is good evidence of wage discrimination based on accents, comparable in size to the gender wage gap, and at least the latter is mostly explained by motherhood. That study was from Germany, but it would be surprising if the same wasn’t found in England or France, two countries where the cultural pull and snobbery of the capital is strong. Even Americans, who despite their lack of aristocracy (or perhaps because of it) are obsessed with status, and can pick up accents from a very brief conversation.
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SubscribeIn my experience the mocking of others’ accents depends on which accent is in the majority in your social environment. If there are relationships of power and your accent is not the required one to “get on in life” this needs addressing, not by laws, I think, but by encouraging appreciation of difference and diversity within your own country. My personal experience growing up in the South West with parents from the home counties, was that my lack of the local accent (I was the “posh”one) led to me being the one who was teased and othered. It made it difficult for me to fit in but wasn’t traumatic, probably because it didn’t prevent me from “getting on in life and I did have some friends! It did awaken me to how the tribal instinct works, though. That, in combination with the tribe being in the authoritative position, must make life difficult for those perceived as not belonging.
You lost me at “relationships of power” and you really lost me at “encouraging appreciation of difference and diversity within your own country”
Lost me at “encouraging appreciation of difference and diversity”, one of the most successful academic scams ever pulled.
Had you read a bit further, you’d probably have realised it was nothing worth getting lost over.
I was born in London but my parents were from the Irish Republic; they came to England in the mid ’50’s. My Mum, aunts and uncles, all had a bit of a brogue, but I never heard my Dad speak with anything other than a standard middle-class “British” accent.
He was a self-employed skilled tradesman and his clients would have been from the upper middle class and the upper class; I’m sure he considered his “natural” accent to have been an impediment to his ability to provide for us, so he simply erased it.
When I moved to London in my 50s, the first thing I tried hard to do was to lose my NZ-Australian accent. My ‘Antipodean’ way of speaking was mentioned more than once in work situations, and I knew it wasn’t an advantage.
It was RP, the approved form of BBC English. A feature of RP is that every vowel and every consonant is voiced, in the interests of intelligibility. Many regional accents pronounce vowels ‘eccentrically’ elide consonants, especially, and have idiosyncratic pronunciations of combinations, like ‘doin’ instead of ‘doing’ e.g. Beth Rigby. ‘glottal stops’ etc. (‘bu’urr’ for ‘butter’). My mother used RP on the phone, but spoke with a stronger Welsh accent at home. Not snobbery, but a concession to the person at the other end of the line, who may not have understood her ‘native’ accent.
The BBC and other media have now abandoned RP and the result is a plethora of indecipherable accents (one guy on Sky TV a few months back appeared to be talking about ‘gangs’ involved in the supply of PPE, till I suddenly realised he meant ‘gowns’). If you don’t hear something clearly first time and understand it, you miss what the person speaking has to say next, since you are still trying to work out what has just been said.
God Ed, you have found another ism to worry about.
This particular one, of course, derives from the Franks conquering the south of France.
However if you want another ism and a more pertinent one to us all it is “Windism”
Where by those of us, who point out that windmills produce no electricity on windless days are mocked. Wind, today, is currently producing 1% of our electricity requirements – but apparently is our golden power source for EV and home heating!
I haven’t been on Unherd that long, but I bet there’s somewhere where rants about wind turbines actually fit.
It is not a rant, it is factual; that is the whole point of the comment I wrote.
I have not seen an article from Uherd with regard to the problem.
Haha, isn’t this better known as ‘turbineism’, not to be confused with ‘turbanism’, which is a whole ‘nother issue?
Ha ha my favourite is alphabetism, where those of us with surnames at the end of the alphabet are routinely discriminated against by the elite at the top end of the alphabet.
Don’t mock me, you know it’s true.
The inconvenient truth regarding that argument Nick is that wind produced near 20% of total electricity in the UK in 2019 according to the Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2020 (Onshore and offshore wind accounted for 52% of the 37% renewables share of total electricity generation).
Then again, don’t let the facts get in the way of good story old sport.
The problem with that being that it didn’t produce 29% everyday consistently, unlike nuclear and fossil fuel sources.
“Can’t drive the car today, the winds not blowing”
Wind Chauvinist
This is a fascinating topic for UnHerd readers from the U.S. My wife and I like to watch British TV episodes and wonder whether the actors in a detective
series like “Vera” all come from different places, given that we can only understand about 50% of what some of them say. It’s a puzzle to us because the UK is approximately the size of Alabama and the thought of so many different accents coming from just one U.S. state is astonishing to us. In the whole of the U.S. there are at most only ten recognizable accents, and those only to reall “Kenners”: Deep South, New Orleans, New York, Boston, Chicagoese, are a few that many recognize. Vast areas of the Midwest, the Plains States and the Far West have little recognizable differences in their speech. One wonders why Britain or France, to name the two you mention, still maintain their local language locution (LLL).
I suspect the much longer isolation from each other of distinct communities in the UK has something to do with the range of accents. As to your ‘LLL’, I reckon all local accents have become less incomprehensable since radio, TV and the rest were introduced.
I think you are right on both counts. However, some regional accents survive more strongly than others.
The history of English is fascinating. Such a shame our regional accents are being lost to the ubiquitous Estuary English, where no one under the age of 35 seems able to pronounce a word containing a “t” without dropping it.
I was visiting my daughter in London a couple of years ago and was returning by Tube from a trip out to Richmond. It was late morning and the carriage was full of mothers with young children so I started chatting to the ones sitting by me. (Apparently, it was a Public Holiday and there was a children’s event they were all going to.) Anyway, the young Estuary English speaking young mother of probably Indian ethnicity asked me what country I came from. Puzzled, because I consider my speech to be accent-less standard English, I asked what she meant. She replied that she hadn’t heard my English accent before so was curious. I was completely taken aback and slightly shell-shocked. But it certainly set me thinking.
This is truly strange, as presumably the young mother has had every opportunity to hear such an accent on the television and radio and in films?
Watches Hindi channels
Lancashire and Yorkshire accents have overtones of salt-of-the earth nobility still. Good people, REAL people,warm, friendly as Glaswegians always say about themselves in Scotland.
There is a difference which was not discussed in the article and that is the difference between dialect and accent. Dialect contains differences not only in pronunciation but also in grammar and form of the language. Dialect exists both in the UK and in the US as well as the accent differences. A discussion of this can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
I was born in Lancashire in the late 1950s. My parents, who, of course lived through the golden age of cinema, preferred American movies to British because they could understand the dialogue
People didn’t travel further than the distance a horse and trap could comfortably go so communities were both very inbred and insular. I remember our local young farmer’s elderly cowman – proud new owner of a motorbike – telling me, back in 1957, that he was looking forward to visiting the city of Bristol for the first time in his life. It was all of 15 miles away. (He also refused to take his driving test because by keeping his ‘L’ (learner plates) he didn’t have to take his wife anywhere. He didn’t want her getting ‘ideas’! Also, found in every county were the ‘county class’ families (of whom I was a member) who spoke what was then called the Queen’s English and these were usually the local aristocracy, squires, landowners and professional classes such as doctors, bankers, stockbrokers, and lawyers, etc.. So each village or a small collection of villages had their own microcosm of diversity of accents and social classes mirroring the country as a whole.
I revisited my old home about five years ago and the same farmer was still running his farm but had been buying up other farms whenever they came up for sale. So he then owned a huge chunk of north west Somerset and lived in the manor. He had always been very canny and must now be worth a fortune. But he had still never travelled except for going to Wales on his honeymoon many years beforehand. He couldn’t see the point of it!
PS: I have lived and work in varied countries all my life, still do, and like Mr Zerson, I find I need subtitles when watching many British programmes on TV or laptop because I don’t understand a word of much of what is being said in regional accents!
You would have understood most British Television 50 years ago. People mock Received Pronunciation today but in fact it was a leveller, not a form of snobbery. I use it now, with a faint Scots tinge. Both Welsh and Scottish people have assumed I am Englsh. But at least no-one has ever asked me to say anything twice.
I thought that a Black Country accent is the most likely to interfere with your chances of getting a posh job
Everything has to come second to where I came from – Norfolk.
A South African friend who worked in London had to phone the Norwich office every week and couldn’t understand the person she spoke to.
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“One of the worst things about Zoom, a friend in finance tells me, is not being able to pick up the status signals and thereby knowing who you can ignore in a meeting.)”
That right there is very telling. No wonder finance people are f*****g cunts, aha.
Interesting article. I hadn’t really thought about English/European accents, probably because I have a Sydney-Australian accent: most people have trouble placing it but describe it as ‘posh/British-y but not quite’ so I’ve never had discrimination issues when speaking English. When I speak Vietnamese though, I have a very strong Southern accent. In Australia, no one really takes notice but if I was in Vietnam, it would be a different story: I’d probably be seen as less poetic/refined — or ‘worse’, people might know I’m from the diaspora and try to scam me.
Equally, this can go the other way. People with ‘standard’ accents often move – whether by deliberate choice or unconscious drift – to or towards a regional or ‘street’ accent. Sometimes this is social, to blend in; sometimes out of politeness, to avoid embarrassing their interlocutor; and sometimes it’s just an inverted snobbery or self-deluding put-on, such as public-school Mockney.
What a load of twaddle, of course apart from the writer of this silly piece the whole world already knows that the Yorkshire accent is perfect English as one would expect from God’s own country.
No English accent has been more derided, to the point now of near extinction, than traditional southern English, the old Wessex tongue, now usually thought of as “West Country” but dying out even there. It was still widespread in Buckinghamshire when I came here 44 years ago but is now never heard. A great pity.