Grace Dean of BBC News reports on a phenomenon I had vaguely thought was safely in the past:
Before she started university, Beth Beddall had never really thought about her Black Country accent. But when she started attending seminars during her undergraduate course at Durham University in 2022, she began to feel self conscious, and avoided speaking up in front of the other students.
Beth, from Sandwell in the West Midlands, recalls a privately-educated student once telling her: “You don’t sound like you’re from a private school.” When she replied telling him she went to a state school, he said: “You must be intimidated by us and how we speak.”
Like Beth, many university students have high levels of accent-based anxiety, according to a 2022 report on accents and social mobility by sociolinguists for the Sutton Trust. More than a third of over 1,000 university students surveyed said they felt self-conscious about their accent, and 47% said they’d had their accent mocked, criticised or commented on in a social setting. […]
According to sociolinguistics expert Dr Amanda Cole, experiences like Beth’s are down to a prejudice called accent bias. People “draw conclusions about everything” based on someone’s accent, “and they do it really fast,” says Dr Mary Robinson, a research associate in language variation and change at Newcastle University.
Participants in new research by the University of Cambridge and Nottingham Trent University said they thought people with some regional accents were more likely to behave in certain ways. Of the 10 accents studied, Glaswegians were perceived as most likely to stand up for someone who was being harassed, people with Scouse accents were seen as most likely to commit crimes and people with Standard Southern British English accents were viewed as most likely to report a relative to the police for a minor offence.
In Britain, the biases people have about certain accents largely come down to class, sociolinguists say. Dr Cole, a lecturer at the University of Essex, says there is a “hierarchy of accents” in the UK, with accents from industrialised urban areas like Glasgow and Birmingham often seen as low status. “Accent prejudice maps onto societal prejudice,” she says. […]
Black Country accents are stereotyped as indicating “low intelligence”, says Dr Esther Asprey, a lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton who focuses on West Midlands dialects. “Urban accents across the UK are associated with a lack of education,” she says. “Which isn’t true – there’s not a causal link.” This stereotype stems back to the industrial revolution, when people moved to cities for jobs in factories, she says.
Dr Asprey says she has witnessed students being “laughed at” in seminars for the way they speak, and that teachers from the Black Country have told her anecdotes about being asked to get elocution lessons. Dr Cole says stereotypes often cause people to change their accents. In fact, the lecturer, who is from east London and grew up in Essex, says she herself has changed the way she talks. […]
Accent bias can also affect the impression candidates make in job interviews and how believable witnesses are seen as in the dock, says Dr Robinson. Fiona Scott, from Radstock near Bath, says if she could have changed her Somerset accent when she was younger so that she could get her dream job, then she would have. She says when she was working as a researcher for regional TV news in the mid-90s, she was told by an editor that she couldn’t be an on-screen reporter because her accent was “unsuitable” for TV. “It never struck me at all that my accent would ever be an issue,” Fiona, now 58 and working in TV production and media consultancy, says. “It definitely hampered the career I hoped I was going to have.” […]
Dr Grafmiller says research suggests that raising awareness of accent bias can “significantly reduce” the impact of bias in hiring and other contexts. “We may still have a long way to go, but these findings are encouraging,” he says. “There are gains in the awareness and understanding of the general public but on the whole, accent bias is so deeply entrenched that I believe it will continue to be a problem for a long time,” Dr Robinson says.
Bathrobe, who sent me the link, says “This kind of thing makes me mad,” and I am in complete agreement. Grr! Stop it, all of you!
Black Country accents are stereotyped as indicating “low intelligence”
The late J Enoch Powell had a classic “Yamyam” accent. Whatever else you say about him, he was not of “low intelligence.”
Glaswegians were perceived as most likely to stand up for someone who was being harassed
You picken on ma pal, Jimmy?
(Yr Alban am byth!)
[I just discovered that in Alba gu bràth the last word is in fact the cognate of Welsh brawd “judgment”, as in “day of.” Obvious in hindsight …]
I trust you’re pleased about the stereotype of Glaswegians.
Yup. Positive stereotypes for all, I say! (Even Edinburgh people!)
I’m struck by the fact that Glaswegians are perceived as being both lower class and dim, but more likely to come to your defense, whereas posh southerners are seen as more intelligent but also more likely to rat out their siblings for unpaid parking fines.
Perhaps a sociology thesis has already been written on these combinations of qualities. But the finding certainly fits with my general views – keep Etonians and Harrovians at a safe distance, and employ Glaswegians as your bodyguards.
Positive stereotypes for all, I say! (Even Edinburgh people!)
Let me just put in a word for the lovely people of Stirling.
I have only ever known one Harrovian to talk to much, that I can recall. He was absurdly pompous; indeed, so absurdly, that after a while you just tuned it out. He was a fairly decent bloke underneath it all. Whether he was at all typical, I cannot say.
Etonians are supposed (by themselves) to have “charm.” Further comment is perhaps superfluous.
I am now reminded that 30 or so years ago when I was vacationing in Scotland there was a heartwarming story in all the local papers about how an attempted robbery of a shop in Glasgow had been foiled when the thuggish young miscreant was knocked down and disarmed by a customer who spontaneously chose to intervene on behalf of justice and public order, with the news angle largely being that the heroic intervenor was 75 years old or something like that and apparently did not visually appear nearly as intimidating as the criminal he had bested. . The hero had lived in Glasgow for 50-odd years but apparently did not self-identify as Glaswegian – relevant because of the stereotype in this thread. When given the chance to modestly tell the journalist that gosh he just did what any ordinary citizen/bloke/Glaswegian would do, he instead said he’d only done what “any gallant Highlander” would have done.
Johnny Depp’s real bodyguard is from Glasgow, Paul Bettany played his fictional bodyguard “Jock Strap” (yok-yok) in Mortdecai. I thought Bettany’s acting and one or two of Paltrow’s scenes (when Depp was off-screen!) were the only good bits.
Miss Beddall is said to be from Sandwell, which I had never heard of. Having now read the wikipedia article, it sounds entirely fictitious – the sort of Seventies ex-nihilo bureaucratic confection that no one would actually self-identify with.
Sandwell is the sort of place or quasi-place where per the 2021 census only a bare majority of residents (52.1%) self-identify as “White” and “English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British.” Is all accent variation in England these days purely a matter of geography and social class, with race/ethnicity not being a relevant dimension? Or has the BBC simply done the story as if only accent variation with the regular-white-British-people subset of the population is interesting enough to write about?
It may be relevant context to Miss Beddall’s experience that Durham reportedly has (as of 3 years ago) the lowest percentage in its student body of graduates of “state schools” (“public schools” in AmEng) of the 24 so-called “Russell Group universities in the UK – lower than either Oxford or Cambridge. OTOH, it’s still a majority. Don’t let the 38% make the 62% feel like they don’t talk proper! https://archive.thetab.com/uk/2022/02/23/these-are-the-russell-group-universities-with-the-lowest-percentage-of-state-school-students-241718
Is all accent variation in England these days purely a matter of geography and social class, with race/ethnicity not being a relevant dimension?
Depends on the generation, but the nisei do indeed generally sound just the same as the aborigines (including the variation by class.) Many of my medical colleagues illustrate this, medicine always having been a classic line that the more dynamic and successful immigrants would like to see their children get into. The idle indigenes want their offspring to go into finance instead.
“Depends on the generation, but the nisei do indeed generally sound just the same as the aborigines (including the variation by class.)”
Indeed. My grandson, born to my Canadian daughter in England, is in the process of acquiring a North London accent from his school.
@Paul Clapham: Well, Canadians have reportedly assimilated more easily into English society than some immigrants of certain other origins since at least the arrival of (Manitoba-born) Winnie the Pooh in Sussex.
The UK, as that hotbed of woke extreme radical socialism and cultural Marxism, the Economist, recently pointed out, is actually pretty good at integrating immigrants. Lloegr am byth!
Don’t believe what accidental purveyors of Roman salutes tell you.
In the U.S. most immigrant-or-internal-migrant groups assimilate linguistically by the nisei cohort, but there is variation, with lack-of-assimilation often having to do with geographical concentration (so not enough old-timey local speakers in the neighborhood or schoolyard for their speech to be the dominant model the newcomers converge on), although there are other factors. And of course the dominant/default local speech can and sometimes does reflect historical input from some particular immigrant* group or groups that was unusually numerous-and/or-early.
*Excluding the first set of Anglophones to establish a continuous Anglophone presence in the given area, to avoid being tautological.
As dramatically illustrated here.