Men can’t make their voices sound sexy – and women with accents get a terrible time

How we talk says so much about us. Now an expert who’s studied speech for 30 years reveals its most surprising secrets

IT’S a part of life we barely think about. Yet from our first words as a toddler, what we say and how we say it shapes our future, including who we date and our prospects at work. Professor Jane Setter has spent 30 years studying the way we talk and the effect it has on every aspect of our waking lives.

Her conclusions – revealed in a remarkable new book – will leave you lost for words…

EVEN A CRYING BABY HAS AN ACCENT

YOU’D think a child’s first experience of people’s voices would be when they’re born but that’s not the case: it starts while they’re still in the womb. From about the fifth month of development, they’re sensitive to sound and can potentially hear the noises going on around their mother in the outside world.

It’s her voice they hear the most loudly and clearly through the amniotic fluid. Try putting your fingers in your ears and counting to five to get an idea of what that might sound like.

They also hear the people who talk to their mother. I spent so much time around a pregnant friend that when the child was born, I was the only person apart from his parents he’d smile at because he was already used to the sound of my voice. Not only can babies in the womb pick up the way we speak, research shows that the cries of newborns have patterns of intonation similar to those of their mother tongue.

It’s nature’s way of making a child immediately fit in with their community by sounding like them.

HOW HIS VOICE HELPED IDENTIFY JIHADI JOHN

MY WORK with phonetics has led to some extraordinary discoveries, and some unsettling ones, too. In the autumn of 2014, a terrorist known as Jihadi John appeared in a series of horrific Islamic State beheading videos and an international hunt was launched to identify him. There wasn’t much to go on, however: he was completely dressed in black with his face covered and only his eyes visible. He could have been anyone.

But we could hear his voice and, as a professor of phonetics at Reading University, I was asked by the media to speculate on where he might have come from and whether he was an immigrant.

The way he spoke could reveal a surprising amount about the man behind the horrific murders of British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines.

From listening to those videos, I could tell Jihadi John had a ‘multicultural London English’ ( MLE) accent. If he was an immigrant, I suggested that he had come to the UK as a child.

The language he used was eloquent, if chilling, and gave me the impression that he was probably educated to university level.

And when Jihadi John was finally revealed to be Mohammed Emwazi, we discovered I’d been disturbingly accurate: he was born to Iraqi parents in 1988 and the family moved to the UK in 1994, when he was six years old.

The family had settled in West London, one of the principal areas where MLE developed, and he went on to study at Westminster University. Emwazi was eventually tracked down by the British secret services and killed by an American drone in 2015.

Eyewitnesses spoke of the extraordinary care he had taken to avoid identification while being filmed. Yet Jihadi John was betrayed by something you might think utterly mundane – the way he spoke.

LILTS CAN WIN FRIENDS . . . BUT NOT INFLUENCE

IN BRITAIN, we suffer hugely from ‘accentism’. Our speech is still very much a marker of regional and social background, and some accents fare much better than others.

While you might consider someone who speaks with an upper-class accent (‘received pronunciation’) to be educated, would you think them friendly? And what would you make of someone with a West Midlands twang?

Socio linguist Howard Giles decided to find out. He played listeners the same words spoken in a number of accents and asked them to rate the speaker on intelligence, leadership, friendliness, trustworthiness, social status, and so on.

Crucially, the same speaker was used every time to make sure it really was the accent determining the outcome.

Giles found that received pronunciation always came out top in terms of intelligence, authoritativeness and social status but did not do so well on friendliness, trustworthiness, or having a sense of humour.

The Yorkshire accent and rural accents, such as those from the West Country and Wales, were thought of as friendly and trustworthy but not educated or authoritative, while urban accents from Liverpool, Birmingham and t he cockney accent were viewed unfavourably in almost all terms. The West Country accent did well enough in terms of attractiveness, but poorly where status was concerned.

It makes no sense a speaker should be judged on the basis of their accent, but that’s what happens.

SOME ACCENTS WON’T HELP ON LOVE ISLAND

ONE survey by a dating agency found received pronunciation and Edinburgh accents the most desirable among people looking for relationships, presumably because they imply the person is educated and therefore has a good job.

So it wasn’t a surprise to sociolinguistics expert Gerry Howley when certain contestants on reality TV show Love Island were criticised for the way they spoke.

The person who got the highest number of negative comments had two things against them: that person was from Liverpool (seen as having an ‘ ugly’ accent) and was female.

For some reason, women are judged more harshly for having regional accents than men.

Liverpudlian Hayley Hughes was criticised for her ‘annoying’ and ‘ cringeworthy’ speaking voice on 2018’s Love Island. No wonder she was among the first to leave the show.

The other contestant whose accent was ‘annoying’ was Niall Aslam from… the West Midlands.

DEEP VOICES WIN WOMEN’S HEARTS

THROUGHOUT evolution, successful men have needed to be visibly dominant, confident and intelligent, which they usually show through strength, hunting ability and being able to fight off competitors. This makes them attractive to women who are looking for someone who can father strong, healthy children, provide for the family and protect against external threats.

The voice is one indicator of how physically large – and therefore potentially powerful – a man is.

In most cases, a large larynx is needed to create a deep voice and large larynxes tend to be found in large men.

So, if you hear a deep voice, you make assumptions about what the man will look like and it’s a surprise if they don’t match up.

Actor a nd musician Martin Kemp recalls his shock on meeting Ronnie Kray in prison before playing his brother Reggie in the 1990 film The Krays.

‘It was the biggest shock of my life,’ said Kemp. ‘ Ronnie had a really high- pitched voice. You would expect him to have a voice like Danny Dyer in EastEnders, but he didn’t.’

MEN SHOULD NEVER TRY TO SOUND SEXY

YOU know those food adverts on television, featuring female voices almost dripping with the chocolate sauce you’re seeing?

Those women’s voices are likely to be breathy, relatively low-pitched and slowly spoken – all the hallmarks of what’s considered sexy.

But why are they always women’s voices? Can’t men be sexy, too, or has the evolutionary need to sound powerful to attract a mate prevented this?

To find out, researchers made recordings of 20 men and 20 women

counting from one to ten in their normal voice.

Then they were asked to do it four more times, first trying to make their voice sound more dominant, then confident, then intelligent, then sexy.

The mundane subject matter was chosen to make sure none of the words picked could affect listeners’ judgments.

Once the recordings were finished, 20 more men and women were asked to rate the speakers on the four qualities they were trying to evoke.

The results were fascinating because, while all of the speakers were able to increase the impression of how dominant, confident, and intelligent they were, only the women were thought to have made their voices sexier or more attractive. When men tried to sound sexy, they actually sounded less attractive than normal, according to the listeners.

It didn’t matter whether it was women listening to men or men listening to men, the results were the same.

The researchers believe this is because men associate a ‘ sexy’ female voice with physical attractiveness, good health and fertility – the qualities they admire.

Women in contrast, expect men to project size and confidence. Trying to sound fertile is just a waste of time for the male of the species.

THATCHER’S SECRET? TAKE IT SLOW AND LOW

WOMEN can also manipulate their voices to seem more dominant, mainly by lowering their pitch, making the voice sound deeper.

This could be because, as women have recently moved into areas of leadership previously occupied by men, they’ve had to change a number of physical attributes to succeed (think shoulder pads in the 1980s).

Women face two central problems in sounding authoritative. First, they tend to have higher-pitched voices, which aren’t seen as commanding. Second, when anyone – even a man – becomes emotional, their pitch rises, which can make them sound rather out of control and fanatical.

This was a problem Margaret Thatcher faced. At the beginning of her political career, she was accused of sounding shrill – not something many people want in a leader. She had to change. Lessons taught her to lower her pitch and keep her voice under control. She also learned to speak more slowly.

These changes meant she sounded more dominant and confident, ready for leadership.

There’s evidence that changing your accent is not usually met with approval, especially if you’re a woman. It seems that it’s seen as an attempt to move from one class to another to sound ‘better than you are’.

But, as Mrs Thatcher showed, changing the way we speak can also work to devastating effect. It really is that important.

© Jane Setter, 2019

Your Voice Speaks Volumes, by Jane Setter, is published by OUP, priced £20. Offer price of £16 (20 per cent discount) is valid until November 26, 2019. To order, call 01603 648155 or go to mailshop.co.uk.