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.
There’s a whole sociolinguistics industry out there nowadays which, along with lefty media types has an interest in accentuating as a unique feature of the British “class system” what probably exists in most countries and societies.
A phenomenon which I think doesn’t get much attention is group accents among some immigrant communities which over some generations have tended to cluster, as with people of Indian sub-continent descent in west London. My impression is that there is a distinct accent there, which I sometimes find difficult to follow.
If you pass through Heathrow you are likely to come across it.
Hopefully someone from the West Midlands will chime in, but I did spend some time in Brierly Heath a couple of decades ago, not far from Sandwell.
For JW Brewer, there are many many people of South Asian or West Indian origin in that area, and their kids grow up talking just like the locals.
And to explain the term “Yamyam”, in that part of the Black Country “to be” is conjugated I am, you am, he yam… or it used to be. I met plenty of older people who had lived their all their lives and were barely intelligible to me. And the posh folks I was working with did indeed regard it as a comedy accent. If you are cursed with a comedy accent in the UK, no one takes you seriously, but they will laugh at you when you crack a joke.
Peter, as a New Zealander, I’d say there are definite difference in speech that correlate with social class here, and I’m sure the UK is not _unique_ but the blatant prejudice seems a lot more intense there. Handy to be from elsewhere with an accent that doesn’t trigger it.
Handy to be from elsewhere with an accent that doesn’t trigger it.
Yes indeed. Having an American accent triggers its own set of prejudices, but not as intense on the whole as the ones raised by having any particular British accent at all. (Including RP – a good accent for upwards mobility, not such a good one if you’re in the wrong neighbourhood.)
I adore the Scouse accent. It’s the most beautiful accent in all of England. I’d be happy to help them commit all the crimes they like provided they talk while they’re doing it.
But my view has much to do with the fact that to me, the most beautiful accent in all the English-speaking world is educated middle-class Dublin Irish.
There’s been a row recently about comments made by English students at the University of Edinburgh claiming that Scottish students don’t belong in their classes, so I believe the Durham thing (I don’t know the details and haven’t read the original student newspaper article, but someone can probably find it!)
I do feel like there’s a certain amount of lack of self-confidence involved in letting it GET to you (who really cares what a yah thinks), but that’s probably unfair. (And after all, looking down on yahs is probably no better than looking down on yokels…)
Going back a bit, I know of Sandwell only as one half of a train station called Sandwell-and-Dudley, one of the long list announced if you get on a West Coast mainline train to London.
I wonder how many of those doublers there are – the only one I meet semi-regularly is Arrochar-and-Tarbet, although there’s also Lazonby-and-Kirkoswald on the Settle line, I just haven’t been down that way for a while. I wonder what the criterion is for not just picking one of the villages.
…I know it’s hard for Britons to imagine, but it really is a unique feature of Britain at first, second and third approximation. Delocalized socially conditioned accents are seriously hard to find outside the island – and even harder outside the Commonwealth.
This, on the other hand, is a widespread phenomenon.
Apologies for being thick, but what are we saying doesn’t exist outside of the UK? Regional accents, or judgement of said accents by people with different accents, or regional accents varying by ‘class’ within one general theme, or something else I haven’t thought of?
I’m not doubting DM’s veracity, just completely lost!
@jen
In this case, the renaming seems to have been because of a names clash (for me, the obvious choice would have been to retain the name Oldbury, since the name-clashing station closed in 1915).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwell_%26_Dudley_railway_station
—
It was originally opened as Oldbury in 1852 and was one of two stations in the town. The more centrally located Great Western Railway (GWR) Oldbury station was located on the site of the bingo hall opposite the Sainsbury’s supermarket and was the only station on the GWR’s Oldbury line from Langley Green.
In May 1984, the station was renamed Sandwell & Dudley, having been demolished and rebuilt by British Rail with longer platforms capable of handling long-distance InterCity trains.
—
I suspect that these double names are often used to replace and “disambiguate” an older shorter name, e.g.,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandal_and_Agbrigg_railway_station
—
The station was opened in February 1866 as ‘Sandal’ and was on the West Riding and Grimsby Joint Railway which linked Wakefield with Doncaster….It was closed to passengers on 4 November 1957, but the route remained open.
The station was then reopened at the same site and renamed Sandal and Agbrigg on 30 November 1987 by the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, one of several closed stations in the West Yorkshire area to be reopened during the mid/late eighties and early nineties (other examples included Frizinghall, Outwood & Steeton and Silsden).
There is a real place called Sandwell in the borough, so ‘fictitious’ is going a bit far, but it was an odd choice for a name when it was created. The sensible thing to do would have been to name it for the largest town – West Bromwich – as was done for the other Black Country boroughs (Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton). There have been proposals to change it, but nothing’s ever come of them.
There are accent differences between ethnic groups in the West Midlands, at least, even among people whose families have been here several generations now, although there are also people from minority groups whose accents are indistinguishable from the majority, and the differences might not be noticeable to non-locals – they’re still definitely West Midlands accents.
I know it’s hard for Britons to imagine, but it really is a unique feature of Britain at first, second and third approximation
I suspect that German speakers are themselves something of an outlier in this. French is somewhere in between, for example.
Certainly, prestige lects are a worldwide phenomenon; how (if at all) this interacts with “class” is going to depend greatly on how privilege itself works in the society in question.
A lot of the issues in the UK relate specifically to “RP”, which is non-local and arose historically in circumstances which have everything to do with the traditional UK class system. There is (and never has been) a region where everyone speaks RP. All this has a lot to do with why UK people remain so hung up on the issue, and are prone to mistake common human behaviours for unique local customs. (Brits are prone to this delusion more generally. It is a deeply ingrained local belief, for example, that the Brits invented queueing and fair play.)
But in lots of languages city-speak is popularly contrasted with rural-speak and associated with all the local preconceptions about hicks and city slickers, for example. It’s also a pretty universal sport to try to assign features of the speech of people you don’t like to the influence of pesky foreigners (with or without an implication that the group that you disapprove of are themselves of pesky-foreigner origin.) You can find all this even within Kusaal, though Kusaasi society does not readily lend itself to a Marxist class analysis …
Stereotyping of regional characteristics is also pretty universal, and readily gets associated with particular regional speech forms (with varying degrees of actual accuracy.)
I paused polishing the smelt whistles long enough to send a link to this discussion to my wife.
She is an East Midlands native. After reading the cited article and the conversation here she gave a notably British harrumph, then code switched to a Midlands dialect and harrumphed again. “Nothing new here.”
Part of what is distinctive about the Scouse accent (and its similarity to a Dublin accent noted above) is commonly said to be the heavy influence of earlier waves of immigration to Liverpool from Ireland. So the children of those immigrants (or “internal migrants” if you want to think of it as all being intra-UK during at least some of the crucial historical period) apparently were not assimilated-without-trace into the pre-existing Lancashire accent.
Re the invention of queueing, I had lunch fairly recently with a US-born-and-raised friend of ethnic-Greek ancestry but specifically Cypriot on his late father’s side, and he said that he had observed on visits to the Old Country/ies that it is not uncommon to find ordinary folks in Nicosia queueing up in an orderly and fair-play-promoting fashion that you would never ever see happening in Athens. Which he attributed to the legacy of British rule* (although it was not clear to him if it was consciously understood that was versus just in the Cypriot context being thought of as the way we do things because that’s how we do them). Which does seem the most parsimonious explanation for this particular Nicosia/Athens difference if his empirical observations were accurate. Obviously, that the British may have introduced or popularized queueing to a given population in a given area does not demonstrate that they literally invented it.
*”All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
I know nothing of the onomastic history of Sandwell other than what I can quickly glean from wikipedia, but it sounds to me like it wasn’t exactly a place name, but the name of a onetime Stately Home (Sandwell Hall) built 1711 and then demolished in 1928 after less stately uses as an asylum and “Industrial School for Mentally Defective Children.” It had taken the Sandwell name because it was built on the ruins of a long-defunct monastery (Sandwell Priory) that had been suppressed by Cardinal Wolsey a decade-plus before monastery-suppression became more universal as the Reformation got underway. Which is a roundabout way of saying that it seems unlikely that anyone would have ever prior to tne 1970’s said they were “from Sandwell” unless they were a monk or a onetime inmate of one of the later institutional users of the site.
Wednesbury strikes my ear as the coolest-sounding of the older places that were mushed together into the new bureaucratic creation, but no doubt calling the resultant combination Greater Wednesbury would have been politically controversial.
What, no love for Balls Hill or Guns Village? It’s true that Sandwell was taken from Sandwell Hall, but the priory was presumably called that because the name was already attached to the place. Whether anyone lived there, I don’t know. I think it’s probably fair to say that no one says they’re from Sandwell, even today, though. It was presumably chosen to offend everyone equally by not using the name of their town.
@Ben Tolley: those are fine names, but don’t have the wacky only-in-Englandishness of Wednesbury, which is at a Chipping Sodbury level of achievement.
Picking a “neutral” name in such a situation is perfectly understandable, but it can also predictably result in something bland that does not attract emotional attachment.
Arrochar-and-Tarbet
For those who, like me, were wondering how to pronounce Arrochar, it’s /ˈærəxər/ (ARR-ə-khər). And Tarbet is short for Tairbeart Loch Laomainn ‘Crossing Place of Loch Lomond.’
Any movie lovers who, like Nat Shockley, adore the Scouse accent should check out the early films of Terence Davies — Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes are set in Liverpool in the ’50s, and the accents are a delight (as are the movies, though they’re pretty much plotless and often sad; they’re incredibly beautiful and well acted).
@J.W. Brewer: Ah, I don’t really get that. I can get enjoyment from Chipping Sodbury-type names, but Wednesbury’s just too familiar, and too much associated with post-industrial urban grimness.
@Ben Tolley: Sure. I probably enjoy the sound of “Wolverhampton” better because of comparative lack of grim associations. (There was some running joke mentioning it on some episode of _Are You Being Served?_, I think? But that’s a perfect example of trivial foreign knowledge of the reality underlying the toponym.)
I have frequently driven through Old Sodbury on the way to visit my sister. I often wonder who the eponymous Old Sod may have been.
Tarbet is short for Tairbeart Loch Laomainn
Well, kind of. Saying Tairbeart Loch Laomainn is more like saying ‘London Ontario’ than like saying ‘Newcastle upon Tyne’ – it’s disambiguation rather than an official part of the name.
(Oddly, the Tarbert which is probably most commonly disambiguated in Gaelic doesn’t get its suffix on wikipedia – Tairbeart na Hearadh)
The Internet thinks that “Wednesbury” really does refer to Woden. If there are devotees of heathenry there, I don’t see them in a quick search. (Wednesbury Shire, “a group practicing Anglo-Saxon heathenry,” is “based out of Columbia, Missouri” (the site of the University of Missouri’s flagship university).
It is possible that “Old Sod” is an ancient kenning for “Woden.”
Re Tairbeart na Hearadh, the Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba online database agrees with Wikipedia and cites 3 sources: “Comhairle nan Eilean Siar 2007”; “Local Informant”; and “Taylor 2007, 150” [something by Simon Taylor?]
Compare the Dingle~An Daingean~Daingean Uí Chúis controversy in Ireland.
@de
I’ll take your Old Sodbury and raise you 1 Tubbercurry.
“Pittenweem” is surely the ultimate UK place name.
Interesting. My postdoc supervisor was from West Midlands, from a family of mining engineers from a town some 40 km from Sandwell, and studied in Oxford in the 1980s. He got a job in the US in 1987, and wasn’t shy explaining that with his accent, he didn’t have a chance back home, but all opportunities were open to him in America. And that he shall prove to the snooty pals back home that he achieved more than they did. In which he actually succeeded in his tragically short life (he was run over by a bus during a morning jog while attending a conference) … department leadership, board positions in societies and editorial boards, a flaming hot start-up business…
But accents differ. Some 20 years ago in the same grand nation I was denied a formal promotion and made an “acting” facility head instead, with a condition that I must finish accent remediation courses before being formally approved 😀
In AmEng one hears references to the “Auld Sod,” which is apparently a mythological personification of Ireland, presumably related in some quasi-supernatural way to the Hag of Sovereignty. The toponym spelling “Auld Sodsbury” was apparently thought too pretentious, innit?
@Jerry Friedman: “Heathen” might be too pejorative a label but a certain tradition of Indo-Europeanists (Dumezil et al.) believe that the pre-Christian religion of the Anglo-Saxons was cognate, as it were, to Hinduism or some predecessor thereof, and there are certainly now Hindus residing in Wednesbury. Various cognates have been proposed between Hindu deity names and deity names in various European paganisms (Dumezil’s own Varuna = Uranus has apparently been criticized by more recent scholars?),* but I don’t think anyone has made such a proposal specifically with Woden. Indeed, the Romans decided Woden/Odin/etc. was conceptually cognate to their Mercury although the names are not cognate.
*The Vedic Dyaus/Dyauspitr is cognate as to name to Zeus/Jupiter, but has apparently receded into marginal significance in post-Vedic times. Casual googling suggests an absence of an attested cognate in Proto-Germanic and its daughters.
I think I’m agreeing with wikipedia, amn’t I?
My point was:
– there are three* places whose formal name is ‘An Tairbeart’ (plenty more, probably, but three decent sized ones on main roads)
– because of this, outside of a local context they’re often referred to by longer names including a geographical location (Tairbeart Loch Laomainn, Tairbeart Loch Fìne, Tairbeart na Hearadh)
– wikipedia gives these longer versions for two of them but doesn’t give the third (Tairbeart na Hearadh), which (if only because it’s most likely to be mentioned in Gaelic!) is probably the one most commonly used.
I was proposing consistency, is all.
*Ainmean Aite na h-Alba disagrees with me about Tairbeart Loch Laomainn, it turns out, but it does quote Dwelly giving the name as ‘An Tairbeart’ a hundred years or so ago.
(The Gaelic WP article is https://gd.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tairbeart_na_Hearadh)
Casual googling suggests an absence of an attested cognate in Proto-Germanic and its daughters
Týr/Tiw, O/C Tuesday, is cognate with old man Zeus/Jove, though he doesn’t get to keep his “Father” epithet (nicked by Mercury, as befits the god of thieves), and has been demoted to merely being Mars.
@David E.: wiktionary-rummaging says Tiw is from PIE *deywós while Zeus is from apparently-separate PIE *dyḗws. Which certainly feel like they ought to be at least cousins, esp. w/ very similar semantics. Puts me in mind of being eight or nine years old and reading library books on Norse mythology (watered-down for children but presumably cribbed from popularizing secondary sources that were almost certainly not up to date on the specialist scholarly literature) which seemed hopelessly confused on the connection-or-distinction between Frigga and Freya. Although wikipedia now suggests that being hopelessly confused may well still be the best scholarly position on that question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigg_and_Freyja_common_origin_hypothesis One or both of them have to do with Friday, though …
Vilkat goð geyja,
grey þykkjumk Freyja.
Frigg “beloved” seems a reasonable semantic match for Venus “loveliness.” She’s the one behind Friday, anyhow.
“Freyja” is a title-turned-proper-name. “Lady.”
“Old Sod” … “Woden” … “Auld Sold” … Hag of Sovereignty
yiddishists, on the other hand, know perfectly well that it’s a degenerated form of יאָלדס סוד | yolds sod, “the fool’s secret” or, if the correct spelling is with a komets-alef rather than a vov, “the yokel’s orchard”.
Given that the place is in Gloucestershire, which is populated entirely by yokels, many of whom are notoriously keen on orchards, I have no doubt but you have discovered the true origin.
(Several of my relations have embraced their inner yokel, and now live in those parts.)
However, outsiders are best advised to avoid close enquiry into the rites yet practiced in these orchards, in honour of the Hag and her one-eyed consort.
@J. W. Brewer: I was using “heathenry” in a sense I got from Wikipedia: Germanic neopaganism. It says the other two senses are neopaganism in general and paganism (which I take to be non-Abrahamic religions). I don’t think “heathenry” is used in that last sense much now, and I certainly wouldn’t use it about Hinduism.
67yo Australian here.
Accent bias can work in reverse.
Whenever I’m watching say a TV documentary on British stately homes, and there’s a talking head of Lord Muck decribing the family pile in a prince Charles sorry king Charles accent, to be fair to him I have to keep repeating to myself like a mantra, “He’s not *necessarily* an upper class twit – that’s just the way some people talk.”
Possibly living in the colonies gives you a different angle on these things.
@Jerry Friedman: okay, I take it that perhaps for certain modern Woden-enthusiasts/revivalists “heathenry” in this sense is a non-pejorative endonym? I am decades behind in keeping up with the factional taxonomy of the U.S. neopagan scene and even worse with whatever the current U.K. neopagan scene may be. (I am fond of much of the music of the gloriously-weird Julian Cope,* but in a cocktail-party-setting would desperately try to change subjects if he got to banging on about his various anti-Abrahamic/pro-Woden religious enthusiasms. “Um yeah, that sounds really cool but what were you just saying about the most grievously underappreciated psychedelic Danish band of 1971?”)
*He has some Welsh connections but not so many that David E. can’t safely disown him and leave the Saxons stewing in their own confusions and factional controversies.
heathenry
Given the “yokel” etymology of both “heathen” and “pagan”, it seems rude to use either word for the contemporary practices of anyone who has not actually embraced the terms themselves (either from in-yer-face-ness à la Crowley or from simple ignorance.)
It’s not always easy to come up with cromulent alternatives, mind. I’ve struggled to come up with something better than “traditional Kusaasi religion”, for example, which quite apart from its mealy-mouthed vibe, has the significant drawback of assimilating said Kusaasi practices to what modern Western Europeans think of when they say “religion”, which is basically a category mistake.
In reality, we know damn-all about actual post-Roman pre-Christian “pagan” religion in Britain, and what we do know suggests that to call it “religion” at all may be to commit much the same kind of error as with the Kusaasi. (In fact, I imagine that many of the more thoughtful sort of neo-pagans might actually agree. Feature, not bug …)
“Say it loud … I’m a yokel and I’m proud …” Surely a term ripe for reappropriation, on the pattern of “queer” and so on and so forth.
But I fear that David is falling into the Etymological Fallacy. 99.99% of currently-living Anglophones, and 99%+ of the minority inclined to dabble in such matters, are likely unaware of the yokel etymologies. They are probably if anything predisposed to think that both “heathen” and “pagan” sound excitingly daring and racy, what with being predictably condemned by those uptight old Bible-thumpers.
If you want to be pejorative for some reason, I don’t think “idolatry” has yet been reclaimed/reappropriated as an endonym of pride.
In the enjoyably silly The Wicker Man, before the islanders, not unreasonably, [SPOILER!] burn Edward Woodward alive for generally being such a prannock, he has this interaction with the ever-wonderful Christopher Lee:
Woodward:
He brought you up to be a pagan!
Lee:
A heathen, conceivably; but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.
(It’s all in the way Lee says “unenlightened.” Lee’s RP is also essential to the effect.)
J. W. Brewer and David Eddyshaw: My impression from Wikip (I’ve met a neo-pagan or two, but no followers of the Æsir that I know of) is that “heathen” and “heathenry” are widely embraced endonyms, as in that group in Missouri that I mentioned. They probably like the Teutonic etymology.
DE: Just making sure you noticed I’m not going anywhere near your suggested kenning.
And yes, I was thinking that Wednesbury would be an ideal setting for a movie about someone who enquires persistently into some unusual practices and gets the chance to participate in a central role. That was just because of the name, but “post-industrial urban grimness”, as Ben Tolley put it, could be made to work.
Christopher Lee was very versatile in playing evil wizards.
if i had encountered it in any context other than the hattery, i’d’ve immediately assumed a place in england called wednesbury was either a typo or entirely fictional (or perhaps in the bielefeld uncertainty zone). the fact that it seems to have spawned a legal principle called “wednesbury unreasonableness” is not helping me believe that it is an actual place.
Christopher Lee was very versatile
Best thing in the whole of The Wicker Man is a fleeting moment almost at the end, when Woodward’s gormless policeman, about to be hauled off for his final contribution to the festivities, shouts at Lord Summerisle (Lee), that next time the crops fail it’ll be him they sacrifice. Lee gives us just a transient quiver in his expression to show that the point has actually gone home before almost instantly recovering his aplomb and calmly carrying on in the true British manner. Masterly. Makes up for Britt Ekland, nearly.
[WP reminds me that Summerisle is supposed to be the grandson of an evil agronomist. I feel that horror films have not sufficiently exploited the concept of evil agronomists, preferring to go for stale cliches like evil doctors and evil clowns.]
“post-industrial urban grimness”, as Ben Tolley put it, could be made to work
I vaguely recall a horror movie (or perhaps TV series) set in grimdark post-industrial South Wales which involved an evil human-sacificing cult. I think a crane hook was involved at the critical point. But I can’t remember enough about it to actually track it down. I don’t think I actually saw much of it. Not my kind of thing.
Jo Walton’s excellent novel Among Others involves witchcraft in a pretty grim post-industrial South Wales.
@David Eddyshaw: The Wicker Man is such a weird movie, and it seems to have a different and much more prominent cultural role in its native Britain than in America. I’m not much of a fan, but I definitely agree that Howie telling the islanders to kill Lord Summersisle next, and the way Lee plays the lord’s response, is the best part of the film.
I’m not really much of a fan of Golden Bough fantasies about sacrificing the king (although it makes more sense in The Wicker Man than elsewhere, precisely because of the artificial nature of the cult). Apocalypse Now shows the horrors of the Inner Station which are mostly only alluded to in Heart of Darkness, but incorporating The Golden Bough was a mistake. The parts of The King Must Die about monarchial sacrifice are picturesque but not thrilling. It’s the Cretan adventure, which only occupies half the book, that is really outstanding, although you have read the leadup to appreciate that part.
evil agronomists
they really should be a major genre of horror film!
and i suppose in a way they are already a genre of horror fiction, but one that generally goes unrecognized as horror (as well as generally holding the agronomist sources of that horror safely off-stage). i’m thinking of much of steinbeck and cather, for instance, as particularly blatant versions, though laura ingalls wilder’s oevre is probably a more exemplary one. i won’t try to pick the russian examples (both 19thC and kolkhoz/holodomor-era), much less the “green revolution” ones, but i know they’re out there.
and now that i’ve written that, i realize this is already a major genre of horror film, under the name of “westerns”.
יאָלדס סוד | yolds sod, “the fool’s secret”
rozele, do you have an idea what the etymology of yold might be? Hebrew yeled ‘boy, child’ doesn’t seem a good match.
i don’t know! and i don’t think manaster ramer has looked into it.
all weinreich has to offer is this, which basically seems to agree with you:
Yold ‘chump’ seems to be from ‘yeled‘ (Heb.) boy, but what about the vocalization? The word is explained out of the helplessness of the new father on the basis of the humorous saying: “If the wife is a /joldes/ [‘woman in childbirth’], the husband is a yold.” It is more likely, however, that yold already existed when the saying arose.
(it’s not in my experience spelled like a loshn-koydesh-stamike word, either.)
brinnen : brant :: jõlen : *jolt?
“someone who goes around shouting”
From the spelling יאָלד yold, what vowel does this word have in the various dialects? An [o] in Northeastern Yiddish and [u] in Southeastern Yiddish? I wonder if that is compatible with occasional the Tiberian vocalization יָלֶד ‘son’. Cf. Poylish /ˈkuːʃəʁ/ and Ukrainisch/ˈkuʃəʁ/ from Hebrew כָּשֵׁר kāšēr. And subsequently with an inner-Yiddish reduction of an earlier */-ləd/ to /-ld/? Does that ever happen?
From p. 224 in Edward Stankiewicz ‘The Slavic determinant in Yiddish morphology’ in Jews and Slavs (1993) vol. 1, ed. by Wolf Moskovich et al.:
That is a nice way of defining (rather old-fashioned?) Russian елда́ ‘dick, cock; idiot’. (Weinreich 1973 is געשיכטע פון דער יידישער שפראך: באגריפן פאקטן מעטאדן Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh: bagrifn, faktn, metodn, which I don’t have access to at the moment.)
For those who read Russian, there is more at Игорь Пильщиков and Денис Иоффе, “Русский мат: вчера, сегодня, завтра” in Зборник Матице српске за славистику (2021) no. 100 (available here), p. 699ff. They remind us that the form елда́к ‘big dick, big cock’ with the element -а́к exists in Russian too. I wonder, do the forms exist in Ukrainian?
Leaving aside the question of whether елдак is the source of yold… O. N. Trubachyov reports a bizarre etymology in his translation of Vasmer:
This eventually leads to note 11, p. 571, in V. Minorsky (1945) “Khāqānī and Andronicus Comnenus”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 11(3):550–578:
I have yet to track down the reference in Sa‘di that Minorsky mentions. Yaldā itself is from Syriac ܝܠܕܐ yaldā ‘birth’. And by a very roundabout way that brings us back to Semitic *wld ‘to bear, give birth to’ and Hebrew יֶלֶד yéled ‘boy, son’.
I hope someone can follow up on Weinreich’s analogical back-formation from plural יְלָדִים yəlāḏîm. I have to go to lunch now.
Hasn’t елда come up before at LH?
Only as a financial markets way to say “yields”. It totally sounds like a noun formed from the f-verb, as some implement used for coitus. But I couldn’t find relevant LH pages with etymology discussion
It is sobering to recognize that Josef Stalin was not only the world’s leading theorist of linguistics but also (and simultaneously?) the world’s leading Evil Agronomist. Puts the rest of us to shame for our limited capacity to multi-task.
Liet-Kynes in Frank Herbert’s Dune is good agronomist…
@Xerîb:
that citation (which is contentious if not dubious) is to the weinreich passage i quoted (from the 2008 edition of shlomo noble’s translation, which included the notes; it’s at ii.A660). i gave it in its entirety; he doesn’t go into any detail or try to resolve the vowel problem, and neither “joldák” nor “jeladim” appear*. it’s the footnote to his inclusion of “yold” in a set of words from loshn koydesh that have what he identifies as (proto)vowel Osub1, now more often called vowel 41, which is realized /o/ (or more accurately /ɔ/) in all dialects. (and it’s always nice to see stankiewicz’s name! he was my first yiddish teacher)
.
* it’s possible that weinreich talks about “joldák” elsewhere, and stankiewicz was only footnoting the reference to “yeled”, but it’s not in the Geshikhte’s index and doesn’t come up with a text search, and neither does the plural form of the latter in any relevant connection.
All obviously derived from the Mooré yalemdo “idiocy.”
@David Eddyshaw: I vaguely recall a horror movie (or perhaps TV series) set in grimdark post-industrial South Wales which involved an evil human-sacrificing cult
Darklands? “Welsh, sweary version of The Wicker Man … set in a Welsh industrial town rife with nationalistic fervour due to the high unemployment levels and the general drabness of the area.”
Yeah, that’d be it.
My memory seems to have deleted most of it, probably in self-defence. The human sacrifice sounds like the only good bit.
The Wicker Man may be pretty silly, but it does have a certain something. This, not so much.
But my view has much to do with the fact that to me, the most beautiful accent in all the English-speaking world is educated middle-class Dublin Irish.
For me that is the most flavorless accent I can think of. Almost indistinguishable from the Upper Middle Class Mid-Atlantic English spoken from Boston to DC. It smacks of a deep shame in even being identified as Irish.
It is sobering to recognize that Josef Stalin was not only the world’s leading theorist of linguistics but also (and simultaneously?) the world’s leading Evil Agronomist
I don’t think Stalin ever claimed to be an Agronomist. Leading Evil Economist maybe (although that’s certainly a contested title).
Wasn’t Lysenko was the world’s leading Evil Agronomist, particularly in that he can take credit not just for Collectivization and the Holodomor but also the Great Chinese Famine?
@Vanya: I had thought there was a quote from Lysenko, praising Stalin as the greatest agronomist (of all time, perhaps?). However, the quote is not in Fads and Fallacies, and I don’t know where else I might have come across it. So I am probably misremembering.
I was reading this sad/poignant memoir (link below) by one of the UK’s more eccentric rock musicians about an old boarding-school chum with a longish but seemingly non-functional adult life who had just reposed (1951-2025). (They were both Old Wykehamists; I’m not sure if one says Young Wykehamist when the context is their school days together?) There’s this bit which I guess is supposed to evoke a particular class-marked way of speaking:
“Oh, God, Hitchcock,” he would exclaim in a posh voice, punctuated with sudden emphasis and the occasional mad cackle.
“Try doing something because you ENJOY it, not because you think it might make you LOOK GOOD – erHAK!”
I assume “erHAK,” which also appears in later quotes uttered several decades subsequently, is the “mad cackle,” but there’s no particular eye-dialect attempt to represent the poshness of the general manner of speaking, which must have become more interestingly incongruous as the fellow went on to live in dilapitated council estates without reliable hot water. So I don’t get as much phonological flavo[u]r from the narrative as I might like.
An interesting language angle from elsewhere in the piece: “He was inventive as ever: at one point he sent me a manuscript in three different coloured inks about (I think) why there was no Finnish translation for the word ‘cone’.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-155809907
Elsewhere in the UK-accents-and-rock-musicians field, I recently saw part of a clip (can’t be arsed to find the link but it can’t be too hard to run down) from not too many years back in which the aged star Brian Johnson (lovely Geordie accent) had traveled to rural North Wales to interview the approximately equally-aged star Robert Plant (lovely Black Country accent), and regardless of the substance of the music-biz reminscing it was nice to just hear their accents sort of sliding around past each other.
That was a bit much at once…
Sociolects, whether or not they were just accents or had their own vocabulary and grammar as well, used to be a common phenomenon. Paris at the eve of the Revolution had at least one lower-class accent (with [r], I think), a middle-class accent (with [ʀ]) and an upper-class accent (with [r]). Yorkshire had the prissy posh-Yorkshire accent in living memory if it doesn’t still. Berne had, up to the middle of the 20th century, an upper-class, an upper-middle-class, a lower-middle-class and a lower-class sociolect, and at least the upper-class one had [ʀ] while lacking a bunch of innovations found in the other three.
But nowadays, what variation survives is geographic. Québécois, with the variation it has developed since, is descended from the prerevolutionary upper-class Parisian accent; most of France, along with the French-speaking parts of Belgium and Switzerland, speak with a single accent* descended from the prerevolutionary middle-class Parisian accent; and the phonetic and phonological variation within Standard German is pretty much entirely geographic. What social variation there is in German or French depends on the situation you’re in, not on who you are.
The great big exception is RP and what has become of it. It’s just an accent, differing just in phonetics & phonology from other accents that Standard English is spoken in in Britain or indeed England; it’s all over the country; and most people who speak it speak it natively, so they speak it in every situation, while most people who don’t speak it can’t speak it.
* I do exaggerate… but what little phonological variation there is outside a southern accent – whether /ɑ/ survives, whether and to what extent [ɛ] vs. [e] and [ɔ] vs. [o] remain separate phonemes or are redistributed between open and closed syllables – is all found among the professors at the same university.
Are all the U vs non-U vocabulary differences gone now? Charles was only five in 1953.
Are all the U vs non-U vocabulary differences gone now?
No; I’m aware of them, and I am quite a bit younger than the King (Gawd bless ‘im.) But quite a few of the alleged differences were fairly fanciful anyway, and the “Marked RP” that you can hear in older recordings of Very Posh People Indeed was actually “marked” more by its phonology than by distinctive vocabulary.
Nancy Mitford’s “U and Non-U”, the locus classicus of all this stuff, broad-mindedly includes a remarkably sensible article by Evelyn Waugh (of all people) which comprehensively takes down the whole thesis of the book. Definitely the best bit …
I think this stirring didactic poem is also included in some editions:
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/785
Right. Alan S. C. Ross’s contribution to Noblesse Oblige is a popularized version of the paper above, which was cited by the Encounter article that kicked it all off.
What social variation there is in German or French depends on the situation you’re in, not on who you are.
That’s not accurate, if you are claiming what you seem to be claiming. It’s fairly easy for example to deduce social class in Vienna if you live here. Upper middle class Viennese do not talk like working class Viennese and most younger people can’t really code switch either. And of course in modern Vienna we now have an immigrant underclass with a new accent, that is also socially marked. Berlin works the same way, even though the accents are different. We just don’t have the gradations and the pan-regional socially marked dialects the way the UK does. Generally in Europe the social differences are local and may not be that obvious to non-natives of the region.
Perhaps of relevance, I am reading a biography of Maria Theresia, which discusses her language acquisition as a child. Apparently she spoke quite refined French and Spanish but she learned German from her nanny so her Viennese German was indistinguishable from the scullery maid or shopkeeper.
It’s true there was no “court standard” for German speaking people to aspire to until the late 19th century, and both royal families were put on the pavement shortly thereafter.
Nonetheless, the desire of people to display social rank through language seems unfortunately universal. One of my favorite examples is the way upper class Stockholmers apparently adopted the guttural “r” pronunciation of the Gotland islanders, because it demonstrated they could afford to vacation there. (Was that discussed here previously?)
That’s not accurate, if you are claiming what you seem to be claiming. [What social variation there is in German or French depends on the situation you’re in, not on who you are.]
I agree completely as regards German. Put in a general way, you are what you [r].
@Vanja,
I lived in Stockholm for 11 years, (2006 to 2017), and I never encountered that phenomenon. The circles I moved in were probably firmly middle class, so my betters may well have been engaged in such behaviours. In any case, what I can find about /r/ in Gotland doesn’t mention guttural pronunciation. There is supposed to be traces of a dialectal feature in Götaland (which is something completely different and not where the posh take their vacations) where some /r/ are apical trills but others are further back, depending on location in the word; however it’s not obvious whether “tongue-root-R” in Swedish descriptions of that phenomenon is velar or uvular. (South of Jönköping the “French” uvular approximant is meant, though).
I lived in Stockholm for 11 years, (2006 to 2017), and I never encountered that phenomenon.
You’re right. I misremembered entirely- the sound in question is the Viby-i, not an “r”, and not Visby on Gotland but Viby, generally meaning the dialects around the lakes in Örebro. I got the gist right though. The upper classes of Stockholm and Göteborg adopted that “rural” vowel sound to show they had the means to afford vacations/summer homes.
It was a late 19th century, early 20th century phenomenon much remarked upon at the time. I gather the vowel persists as a feature of urban speech in Sweden but has apparently lost its class marking shibboleth status.
What would a velar R be? [x]? Or a velar trill? I… can perform a velar trill, but it takes a lot of power and literally hurts.
Both were in my school. Admittedly, the one guy who couldn’t switch his “Meidlinger L” (velarized to pharyngealized) off was definitely working-class, but that feature is in fact restricted to an area similar to Meidling (the 12th of the 23 districts of the city).
What are the differences you’ve noticed?
…Admittedly, the federal top politicians with eastern Austrian monophthongization of diphthongs that I can think of right now were Social Democrats. But again that’s a feature that people from elsewhere in the country can’t have regardless of their sociolinguistic background.
Yes (in the last 20 years); I heard it just today as it happens. But that’s not just an accent, it has its own vocabulary and grammar. It’s actually surprisingly similar in all three respects to the immigrant sociolect of Berlin and AFAIK elsewhere in Germany.
It’s true there was no “court standard” for German speaking people to aspire to until the late 19th century, and both royal families were put on the pavement shortly thereafter.
The nearest we to that we got was the Junker dialect of the Prussian officer-aristocrat class, which sounded a lot like Berliner dialect (/j/ for /g/, contractions like hamse for haben Sie) plus features like dropping the 1st person singular pronoun. That dialect was deprecated by the educated middle and upper classes and never spread outside the Junker class, and it died as an upper class dialect when the Junkers lost their influence after WW II.