What’s in an accent?
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend the day at Manchester museum, where the linguistic diversity collective were holding a number of events to celebrate international mother language day.
Among other things I got to do a language treasure hunt around the museum, and watch an ultrasound of my mouth and tongue as I made different sounds! The most interesting part of the day for me though was a talk by Dr Alex Baratta on accent bias in English teaching.
I have a love-hate relationship with my own accent. I’m from the north east of England so a proper Geordie, with the accent to go with it. I hate it when fellow geordies appear on quiz shows on TV. I cringe and ask ‘we don’t really sound like that do we?’ Then they inevitably get all of the questions wrong, perpetuating the stereotype that we are uneducated. Either way I end up shouting at the TV! On the other hand though, I always remember when I was about 14 and a friend of mine started taking elocution lessons because she wanted to work in theatre. I was really affected by it, I couldn’t quite articulate why at the time, but I took it as a massive personal insult that she didn’t want to speak like me (I was a teenager, so of course the world revolved around me!) To the point where I exaggerated my accent when I was around her or her parents, like some kind of act of defiance or rebellion. I wore my Newcastle United football shirt when I went to her house and used slang I knew she didn’t like to annoy her.
All this shows just how much accent and identity are tied to one another – it’s our sense of place. I was proud of where I came from, how I’d been raised, and how I spoke and who was she to suggest that it wasn’t good enough? That I wasn’t good enough? It’s a two way street though – there is the identity that we attribute to our own accent, and what others attribute to it. Is a northern accent friendly or is it uneducated? Is it down to earth or is it common? When we say that we dont like an accent is it actually the pitch, cadence, sound that we dont like, or is it what it represents? In his talk Dr Baratta talked about watching Korean films, explaining that he knew enough to distinguish that one accent was different from another but he didn’t particularly favour one over the other. Why? Because he didn’t have any preconceptions. He didn’t grow up there and so for him the accents don’t have the cultural baggage that they would for a native speaker.
We’re drawn to people who speak like us and sometimes cautious of those who don’t. It’s why when you are in a foreign country or even just a different city and you hear someone that speaks like you, you immediately feel the need to talk to them. It’s also why cartoons (looking at you Disney!) nearly always give the villain an unfamiliar accent compared to the other characters – it brings more of a sense of menace than facial features. Studies show that for young children an accent plays a larger role than visual clues such as skin colour when they decide who they want to be friends with.
Younger people it appears are embracing regional accents more though, with received pronunciation (queen’s English) being rated lower by them. The BBC now has more news readers etc with regional accents, and we’re getting better in schools at teaching that certain dialects are ‘non-standard’ instead of ‘incorrect’. Still there is a long way to go it seems.
It also made me think of the accent that I have when I speak in Spanish or Italian. It’s not terrible but it’s not a native one. Why does that matter though, I don’t necessarily want to sound like a native speaker, I want to be understood. Ultimately if someone has an accent that sounds strange or foreign, it probably means they speak more than one language. I leave you then with one of my favourite quotes
