One in four have accents mocked at work – survey
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
After clearing customs, I managed to get the rest of the way through the airport, through “the tube”, onto a train to the midlands, a taxi ride, and checked into my hotel with hardly any talking.
The front desk person dutifully told me that the restaurant was closed, but room service available (this is pre door dash, et. al.).
I got to my room and unpacked, with the TV playing in the background, as was my way back then and now. I did some stretching, and then decided to order some dinner.
I picked up the phone, dialed the room service number, and after I was greeted by a pleasant “Room Service?” I immediately felt my body wanting to reply with terribly Monty Python voice of American’s trying to sound British.
I couldn’t stop myself. I could just feel it wanting to happen.
So I hung up.
Confused, and somewhat alarmed because I had 3 days of corporate training to perform and that’s not going to go well if I have an accent trying to break out of me like a teenage boy’s voice breaking uncontrollably, I turned off the TV and tried practicing talking.
Even alone in my room, it took me a few minutes to try and get it under control. I grew up moving quite a bit between places with people from all over, so I don’t, myself, have a particularly stable accent. It was especially true when I was younger.
I finally worked myself up to remake that call to room service, and I managed to force myself speak with a right proper American accent…
Spaniards are most fun to imitate, because they have more phonemes than us Latin Americans. The differentiate they Vs and Bs, and their Ss and Zs, but we don't, so we mock ourselves more by mocking them.
But - the UK is deeply and relentlessly classist. Accents are one of the instruments that ruling classes use to keep the hoi polloi "in their place". So this issue gets highlighted routinely - and there has been a real effort to address the problem, particularly by Labour governments (starting with the Blair ones) and particularly in state-controlled media.
We used to tease someone at work who had a posh accent; they pronounced Diet Coke as 'Daat coake'. Everyone makes little jokes all the time in the workplace, but if anything we possibly went a bit to far in teasing that person because we felt she was fair game being from a privileged background. You can often tell from an accent when someone has been privately educated; there are many situations where this might not be an advantage so these people also try to suppress their accents. The dim witted but arrogant privately educated schoolboy is a British cultural meme.
Having an accent from a different region can be a disadvantage just because in some regions you literally would not be able to understand what people are talking about among themselves because you don't understand a) the regional use of dialect and b) the local topics of conversation that will have specific regional words.
Power dynamics are the same actions having different outcomes.
I’m British and I love a good bit of banter as it shows trust, but taken too far or done with any significant power asymmetry becomes toxic very quickly.
I guess perhaps fitting the working-class box is "cooler" in popular culture, though.
Here's another example: Interactions with the police.
As someone who, whilst though I grew up poor, is white, eloquent and has a Surrey accent, the various times I've been arrested I've been able to deftly fit into the "good citizen who's made a mistake box" and got off with minimal consequences. If I talked like I was from the estate or had a darker complexion, these interactions would sway toward the "bloody criminal" box and I would have had the book thrown at me.
Laughs in aristocracy and Oxbridge
> having an accent that is too posh in Britain is also a disadvantage
If you want to be a football pundit, maybe. It definitely won't be in any managerial / upper-level position, or anywhere where real money is around (finance etc).
> she was fair game being from a privileged background
That's the thing - she was playing the class game wrong, if she was in a setting full of people from a different background. She was not in the right job for her class. Classism works both ways; it's still classism.
> Having an accent from a different region can be a disadvantage just because
That's the natural state of thing everywhere, if anything it's less pronounced in Britain because actual language differences are minor (compared to, say, continental Europe). This is not what people are anxious about; they are anxious about revealing they hail from a region that is outside the South-East, and hence is considered poor - with all that it entails. Not a biggie in a country where bootstrapping is lauded, but a serious problem in a classist society.
Btw, I'm not British, but I've lived on these cursed islands for enough decades to experience "the system" in all its gory details.
It's well documented that fee-paying private schools (so called 'public' schools) contribute disproportionally to UK politics [0]. Eton alone [1] has produced 20 prime ministers (including Johnson and Cameron). These schools require wealthy parents, and thus tend to exclude the poorer paid.
Although you are much more likely to hear regional accents in British media than you used to, social mobility is more constrained now than it has been in living memory. Actors are another group of people where parental wealth correlates to access to drama schools.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#Politics
> We used to tease someone at work who had a posh accent
> because we felt she was fair game being from a privileged background
Isn't this British classism?
"We felt she's from a different social class, so we teased her because of that".
I remember when shopping with my wife who just moved to the UK, a retail worker was chatting with us and she was explaining to us something along the lines "Oh you know like when you go shopping in Tesco... or if you're posh then it's Waitrose.".
Isn't this subtle, unconscious British classism too, that says who you are based on where you shop?
UK life can be somewhat tribal, like anywhere, but I don't recognise your framing of the UK as "deeply classist" nor do I think any classism is as one way as you paint. I grew up lower middle class/working class in very working class areas (council estates, ex-mining villages/towns, that sort of thing). Two of the worst things you could be in those areas was "posh" or from outside the area. So called inverse snobbery was a big thing. If anything, though, not being local was a bigger cause for feeling like an outsider.
The resentment may go both ways, but the effect is completely different. Some children in a mining town making fun of some visiting kid’s posh accent is probably unpleasant for the kid. Adults from that mining town being on the receiving end of class-based discrimination (whether conscious or subconscious) when being evaluated for university applications, job interviews, salary reviews or promotions is something else entirely.
Upper class Cleese: "I'm upper class, so I look down on him".
Middle class Ronnie: "I'm middle class, so I look up at him, and I look down on him".
Lower class Ronnie: "Oi know my plaice".
I have lost my "cuntree" accent, because that shit is a far bigger impediment to getting a job than actual class. (and in some cases race, but thats more complex)
but, for those who are outside of the UK and want to understand, its hard to translate. There are three things that you are judged on here in the UK, and they are all sort of related to class:
o Your clothes
o your attitude
o your accent
All of these are proxies for class. The most important thing to be aware of is that race is not normally a signifier for class. to use a recent example:
Rishi, our new prime minister, is posh as fuck. Posher, but not by much, than Liz truss. However less posh than Boris, as he is a no fooling aristocrat.
If we compare Rishi to Priti Patel, former Home secretary, who is middle-middle class at best. The differentiator is accent, not wealth. Rishi is richer than the king, but thats not why he's posh.
That is not to say that race is not a factor. its just nowhere near as big of a thing as it is in america.
The advantage is that you can change your class, its much harder to change your race. However your class at the time of your birth leaves an inprint/set of habits that are difficult to overcome. I do know someone who was raised on a london estate with a strong SAAAAAF LAAANDEN accent, who now is a QC/KC (senior lawyer) and has a received pronunciation accent. It wasnt until I met her parents and sister that I realised how much she'd changed.
[1] https://youtu.be/Feb-CdHBXc8?t=114 Although the mum has quite a soft central norfolk possibly norwich accent.
As someone who grew up in the U.S., those have a pretty large overlap to me
That being said, over those 15 years, I was only openly discriminated against once.
if you go to the countryside, you will be treated as a rare and unusual person of status. but you still have to queue.
Example: our PM, a man of Indian heritage (though British) who speaks RP.
An Indian man with a really strong accent is going to be judged as being significantly lower status.
I think it'd be the same pretty much across the scale. Like imagining a Polish software developer vs a builder and the latter would probably have a rougher accent.
A strong southern American accent, etc.
That said I found it absolutely wild how much of a sixth sense Brits have to figure out where someone hails from. And also the extent to which people unlearn behaviors.
A french person of any colour or location is instantly stylish and metropolitan. It doesn't matter if you come from the slums of Paris or Marseille, or some 4 house village in the middle, you, as a french person represent fashion, food, cutting remarks and wine.
Germany: (dont mention the war) represent punctuality, lack of humour, process engineering. Artists are not german.
Italian: hand waving, sun glasses, food.
USA: crassness with a lack of class (which is subtly different from being working class)
Japanese: The person you are speaking to is from a long an famous line of culturally important families.
Now, those are the fun ones. This is where it gets a bit dicey, so please don't think I share these opinions. these are illustrative generalisations
Eastern europeans: Imagine you are a family that has the same name as the villiage you live near. You own an estate, its been in the family for years, and you have labourers that have also been with the family for years. You hold them in high esteem, but they are very much working class. THats how they are viewed. "useful working class"
Anyone from the indian subcontinent(pakistan, india, bangladesh) or looks like they are from there (see Ugandan expulsion) with a non received pronunciation accent, will generally be treated as working class. Its not universal, but its a strong assumption. Think small shop owner, pharmacist, etc etc etc.
North african: Good question not sure
west african: Instantly assume they are from an estate in lAAANDEN.
East african: Also not sure.
Well, you are being quite polite here. Some people would say "working class", and some would suggest the contrary.
But to your other point, yes, I am deliberately avoiding writing that viewpoint down....
There are, of course, two kinds of Eastern Europeans. There's the kind you mention, and there's the kind that own everything.
Luckily for the British, they're easy to differentiate based on the amount of fur accessories.
It's ingrained, having certain accents is an advantage.
As someone who comes from the North East of Scotland I'm not sure I'd agree with that... then again I might be blissfully unaware of my lowly status in life.
She trained to be a doctor in Nottingham, where she was typically undermined by other doctors and patients due to her accent and the percieved professionalism that is lacking with that accent.
We now live in the North East, and she hasn't had a repeated experience from anyone local - just those with a more 'southernly' accent. The respect she's given is night and day in difference.
In conversation with her colleagues, I asked if the inverse was true for them. Did their southern accent cause a barrier with the patients in the North East? None of her colleagues could comprehend the question, let alone could provide a clear answer.
Obviously they don't, what they need is to occasionally justify activity to redress the well-known imbalance. One might argue this need is at its highest, in a climate where the last 5 prime ministers are Oxford graduates.
In France we have a "standard" accent (the one you hear on TV or on the national radio) which corresponds more or less to Paris and the surrounding regions. Someone speaking with this accent is "neutral".
We then have an accent that is not related to a region but to the kind of neighborhood called "cité" with large buildings with working class inhabitants (and immigrants). It puts you either in the "homies" category, or in the "touch luck to find a better job" one. People who come from these places, when they want to move up with jobs, will aggressively work on loosing this accent.
Finally, there are the regional accents that are not very visible outside of the region. The southern one is very distinctive and a northern one has been made famous by the movie "Welcome to the Sticks". They tend to vanish if you come from these regions but live/work away from it because there is a gradual move towards the "neutral" accent. people who use it, however, are not really discriminated (this is rather a folklori accent), but you do not hear it much. there are exceptions such as one of our prime ministers.
Then there is a specific posh accent which has strongly fallen out of fashion and people who were raised with it actively try to use the "neutral" one as well.
That said, Irish people tend to be very fond of accent mimickery too.
That's when I realised, Oxbridge is not good if you want people to not instantly dislike you in Ireland.
cambridgeshire and oxfordshire accents are rather different
most of the students attending won't be from either
as someone who did attend: I can count the amount of people I met that spoke RP on one hand
My partner is from the East Midlands and of course her accent is quite different, but on a couple of occasions my partner has gotten an angry scowl from some random old man, usually in some small-town pub.
I thought anti-English sentiment had gone the way of the dodo — when I was a kid it was more common — but I guess it's still hanging on in places :(
I'm in Nottingham in my holidays at the moment — I spoke to an elderly man who was originally from the north of England and he happened to bring up accents.
He was in the army for a few years and he said he had to change his accent because [putting on a strong northern accent] "if oi talk loike this, people thought oi was a blimmin' idiot".
I wouldn't pay that much attention to the comments as it's almost entirely the usual set of "UK bad" professional contrarians
(not to say that the class system still isn't prevalent, it definitely is, but not in the way they say)
> Many of those who were mocked for the way they spoke admitted anxiety over their future career prospects because of perceived prejudiced attitudes.
The biggest concern for northerners regarding their future careers is the continued and unchecked concentration of power and wealth towards London and other major cities. Their accent is close to the least of their worries.
Potato, potahto. The concentration of power and the prejudice are not unrelated. But also, when you say "other major cities" .. the number 2 and 3, Manchester and Birmingham, both count as "northerner". Power is really just being focused on London and Tory marginal constituencies. Those are the places that really get attention.
#4 city is supposedly "Leeds-Bradford", which I don't like as a definition and Bradford is blighted by a literal crater as well as the usual urban problems.
My accent isn’t Deep South thick, but it’s there. I’ve embraced my use of “ain’t”, “y’all”, “fixin to”, and “whatnot”. When poked fun at, I generally respond with a “bless your heart”. Which people misunderstand as politeness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
(Also factor in the bans at various times on speaking Gaelic or Welsh; children were being beaten for speaking Welsh at school well into the 1970s, but the plan to extinguish the language never quite succeeded.)
30/40 years later the differences are still there, but increasingly ironed out by the spread of a generic southern English accent. Where I now live in rural Oxfordshire, the traditional local accent is a definite minority, particularly in those under 40. There are little tell-tale vowels and phrases if you look closely for them, but they're more like variations on a common accent.
That said, Midlands and northern accents seem to be fairly resilient, at least for now.
Political winds just revived what was effectively a dead language, in the nick of time.
Is an interesting insight into the accents of the new country of the USA.
Its important to remember that the USA has a very different understanding of class compared to the UK.
Its also important to understand that accents change wildly within 50 miles. (sheffield, bolton & leeds are all divergent so are manchester birmingham and liverpool)
Received Pronunciation is just that, received.
You can learn it, in fact it has been and continues to be taught both in schools, in elocution lessons, and in educational videos online.
I sincerely doubt that this is a purely UK based phenomenon. The example that comes to mind is the stereotypical "black man with white accent" from US sitcoms. I don't know how that works in the real world, but I'd feel fairly confident in placing a bet that there aren't many white collar CEOs who sound like they're from the hood.
To many people their accent is an important part of who they are, part of their identity and one that can't simply be switched out for 8 hours a day.
In fact, I'd probably go as far as to say that one of the reasons it has the cachet it does is precisely because of that, because of what it's not.
It's vitally important that Southerners keep talking in silly accents. It's useful to spot people who are going to try to steal your stuff using emails.
I don't know anyone in my family who works a middle class job. You're either unemployed or postman around here. Growing up my school was so bad you were lucky to leave with a few GCSEs. In general you were far more likely to leave with a kid or a smoking addiction.
My whole adult life has been a learning experience. I remember first being confused when people mocked how I spoke in university. It wasn't just one or two people either, literally everyone I spoke with would comment on how I spoke.
In terms of work, I'm not sure how it's impacted my ability to find work, but I don't think it's helped. Several years ago when I was still learning how to not be working class I had an interview in which I was asked a question I knew I knew the answer to, but just couldn't quite recall. I said something like, "fuck, I know this but can't remember". I didn't swear consciously, it's just automatic, but the interviewer lost it and terminated the interview on the spot saying I was wasting his time. That really upset me as I was having a hard enough time finding work as it was.
At one point in my career I ended up working for a start-up incubator in London which was interesting. Everyone there was unbelievably well spoken and while at that point I was starting to get good at not coming across as working class I did get comments whenever we'd go out drinking because I'd temporarily find it difficult to speak proper. Not nasty comments or anything though - they were all really nice - but people obviously noticed and were confused why someone in real life was talking like they were on Jeremy Kyle.
I think the hardest part of it is having to self-censor my sense of humour because what I deem offensive or unacceptable is completely out of whack with those I work with. My humour seems to be quite mean which I think is normal for working class people. Like I can joke about literally anything with school friends, but I have to be very careful with jokes at work. Calling someone a gayboy as a joke for doing something a bit gay is unacceptable for example. I also don't seem to know when people are being mean. Middle class people tend to be very easily offended and will hold in their feelings so it's hard to know if you're offending them. I'm not used to that. Growing up people would speak very plainly with each other so that's by far the hardest part for me.
I think I'm quite an extreme example of this class divide though. I'm also not sure what the answer is. I judge people who speak like myself force more harshly than anyone I work with. Unlike people I work with I know people from my background are generally trashy.
Ridiculous accents and the mockery of them are a proud British tradition.
Few, other than a close circle of friends, will openly mock you but the silent majority will judge you as soon as you utter a word.