‘Putting on a twang and hiding your roots with a plummy voice is a pretty disloyal tactic in my book’
Have you ever suffered accentism? As in being judged for your regional burr. Welsh people who stray across the border usually do. My most embarrassing episode of Valleys brogueabuse came at a 21st-birthday party at university.
There I was, quietly supping a glass of Black Tower – our cut-price bevy of choice in those cashstrapped student days – when the party host hurtled across the dance floor towards me. The birthday girl was Kirsten the Sloane – collar up, pearls gleaming. She had her wellcoiffed Home Counties mother in tow.
“Mummy, mummy, this is Carolyn – she’s from the Rhond-aaaaa!” trilled Kirsten as her mater peered at me with the curiosity she usually would have reserved for the Amazonian shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers museum down the road.
“Mummy, you HAVE to hear Carolyn speak. It’s so funny!”
Her mother smiled encouragingly, waiting for linguistic curtain-up.
“Come on, Carolyn, SAY something!” Kirsten implored.
I wavered. Should I do my best Ruth Madoc Hi-di-Hi routine or drop two octaves and growl like Windsor Davies. But then Kirsten started issuing stage directions. I knew what was coming.
She cocked her head to one side, grabbing her left lobe.
“Tell Mummy what these are, Carolyn” she grinned.
“Yurrs,” I replied, with weary resignation. Kirsten let out a squeal of joy. “And what are these?” she asked, flicking the pearls suspended from said yurrs.
“Yurrings” I sighed. Kirsten looked as if she might combust with hysteria.
“Didn’t I tell you Mummy? Isn’t it just hilarious?”
To be honest, I didn’t really mind Kirsten using me as the performing monkey of Cymric pronunciation because even though she sounded like a junior Joyce Grenfell she was actually a bit thick.
I did mind, however, the tutor who ended every tutorial by saying “great” with the flat Valleys vowel sound and a smirk.
She might have thought her Welsh accent was as impressive as her grasp of critical theory, but like most people who can’t do it properly, her mimicry rendered her more Mumbai than Maerdy.
After three years of having the mick ripped out of my accent at Oxford, I returned home with a slight twang.
Yet in terms of assuming airs and graces, my mother was far more disturbed by my sudden penchant for Earl Grey – or “that perfumed rubbish” as she called it – than by an accent that had moved down the Valley Line from Llwynypia to somewhere approaching Radyr.
Some Welsh people who are temporarily embedded in the institutions of the English establishment do go native. Guardian journalist Stephen Moss wrote a piece a few years ago lamenting the loss of his Welsh accent at Oxford.
“I went to a large comprehensive, and if you had heard me speak at the age of 18 you would have said I had a Welsh accent, though nothing like as strong as those further west or in the Valleys,” he wrote.
“It was a dangerously malleable accent, as befits so liminal a town as Newport, which has never known whether it was Welsh or English.
“I had the good fortune/misfortune to get a place at Oxford University and, within a month or so of getting there, my sing-songy nearWelsh Bristol-estuary accent had gone, to be replaced by a monstrously posh voice that made Terry-Thomas sound common.”
Moss adds: “Joan Bakewell used to joke that when she went to Cam-
In a society that is making strides towards acknowledging the importance of diversity, accentism does appear to be one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination
Telling ambitious and talented people from non-establishment backgrounds to start speaking like a dinner-jacketed newsreader from the 1950s is laughable
bridge in 1950, she ducked into a toilet, shed her Lancashire accent and came out speaking perfect cutglass RP [Received Pronunciation]. It took me a bit longer than that, but at the end of the first term – a mere eight weeks – I had swapped Lower Welsh for Higher Oxford.
“Much later in life, I did a session with an actors’ voice coach to write an article, and she told me my accent was not Oxford of the 1970s but Oxford of the 1950s! My switch had been as extreme as you could get.”
For all the Mike Yarwood antics of Kirsten the Sloane and the critical theory tutor, I could never have dumped my accent with such alacrity.
But some see the benefit of being linguistic chameleons. I get particularly tickled by those Taffia types who speak English with aristocratic accents then switch to the Welsh language with the diction of an archdruid. It’s an act of social shape-shifting that sees them ease seamlessly from English elite to Welsh crachach.
It took a four-month journalism training course in Newcastle, straight after I graduated, to reaffirm the importance of one’s native brogue.
The Geordie accent has the same infectious lilt as a Welsh accent. Some of the vowel sounds are so similar I came home speaking like Jimmy Nail’s kid sister.
But while we revel in our regionalism, others will damn us for it as soon as we open our mouths.
Dr Alexander Baratta, an expert on the subject at Manchester University, reckons accentism – the pressure on people with regional accents to assume a mode of speaking closer to received pronunciation – is the last taboo.
Arguing that it’s on a par with racism, he says “people make snap judgements based on accents” and that in an effort to fit in, many of us modify the way with speak, with “potentially dire psychological consequences”.
In a society that is making strides towards acknowledging the importance of diversity, accentism does appear to be one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination.
Which is presumably why we’re yet to hear a newsreader with a broad Brummie brogue on the Six O’Clock News.
Prejudice towards pronunciation is rife, as is demonstrated by the participant in an accent study who told Dr Baratta: “If you’re a Glaswegian on Casualty, you’re gonna be violent. If you’re Scouse, you’re gonna be a scumbag. If you’re from Newcastle, you’re gonna be thick.”
And this week in the Radio Times, author and critic Jonathan Meades issued a rallying cry for Received Pronunciation – also known as the Queen’s English.
Meades claims RP does not deserve its snobby status and though derided as the accent of posh people, social climbers and Radio 4 announcers. it should be celebrated as a means of “bettering oneself”.
Its decline, he says, would make it more difficult for people from diverse backgrounds to supress “accentual tics” and build careers in which they were judged on skills rather than background.
He also complained that selfimprovement had negative connotations, “as though growing away from one’s regional identity was an act of treachery”.
Well it is, isn’t it? Putting on a twang and hiding your roots with a plummy voice is a pretty disloyal tactic in my book.
Telling ambitious and talented people from non-establishment backgrounds to start speaking like a dinner-jacketed newsreader from the 1950s is laughable.
Plus the concept of RP as a “tool of social mobility” is baffling. We’ll only know social mobility is truly possible when hear myriad accents across the media and public life. And there are signs of change. Apparently even the Queen doesn’t speak the Queen’s English anymore.
As linguist Dr Barrata says: “The real world is about accent diversity, so if you’re diluting how you speak it’s not a real representation.”
So Jonathan Meades should open his ears to the true music of the regional accent…or even his yurrs.