Claire Lemon. I’ve always wanted to put her name in print, and if I could remember her brother’s name, I’d publicise that too. Claire Lemon and her brother, in their self-built house up the road, who tied me to a radiator twenty years ago and told me to “stop speaking posh, you snobby cow”.
Admittedly, I was speaking with a Hertfordshire accent in Yorkshire, so such treatment could conceivably fall within the acceptable parameters of childhood cruelty. But it was only two years since I’d had my broad Yorkshire – are yer comin ter lake wi’ us (come and play, please) – intimidated out of me by a gaggle of well-spoken little girls at boarding school in Bushey. And only one year, on the other hand, since I did the same to a new arrival from Lincolnshire. Say b-a-t-h! Say l-a-u-g-h! How do you pronounce “afternoon?” Wrong! She said them again and again until the ‘a’ was southern and long, and she spoke southern like the rest of us.
I’ve always thought this treatment was exceptional. Also wrong. Scratch an accent, and childhood linguistic trauma usually crawls out from underneath.
My friend Tom: “I said raspberry on a school trip and from that moment on I was doomed. (“snob! snob!”). Three years of unrelenting grief every time I forgot my new school accent and did a long a instead of a short one. I remember a total panic one day when I had to say the word aunt and couldn’t work out whether the local accent was ant or arent. (Oh, and the first girl to notice it was Sally Parker and I hope she’s burning in hell.)
My mother, even more surprisingly – “I went to this posh school, and coming from a common background, I felt like a pariah. The first week there, I was told by Miss Crout to stand up and read, I know a bank where the wild thyme grows…… As I started to read she said….”Stop!” and then said coldly, “.” All the girls giggled (all upmarket Surrey girls whose fathers worked in the city) and I remember feeling so humiliated.”
Surprising, because the southern, “posh” accent of my southern-educated, northern-based mother has always been a household feature. Last Christmas, it sparked a new family game, whereby a young nephew was asked to choose between two pronunciations (he chose southern “car” and northern “bus”, for the record). It was good timing: Linguistic experts have learned that children start distinguishing between accents at the age of three and a half (about the same time they give their toys different voices). In England, though, they probably develop perfect accent pitch in the womb. Nowhere, not even in the most rigid of Hindu caste systems, is as obsessed by accent as much as this small island. Or part of it – the Scottish and Welsh were too busy (fighting the English, probably) to develop as complex and damning an accent hierarchy as ours. Only here do so few words reveal so much – background, gender, sexuality, schooling – and generate such contempt, so concisely.
There’s a standard scale of prestige: Poshest first – conservative received pronunciation, or RP, as spoken by the Queen, Chumley-Warner, and Pathé newsreels – comes top. Then modern RP (Anna Ford, the average non-Celtic newsreader), rural (softer first – Robin Cook, Huw Edwards – stronger second), then bottoming out into the generally despised speech of the big conurbations like Liverpool, Belfast and Birmingham.
And every stage of the descent has a sackful of assumptions tacked to it. A modern RP speaker is thought educated, intelligent, competent. Brummies are ugly and comical. Yorkshire and Geordie are friendly and trustworthy – it’s no accident that Midland Bank spent lots of money on deciding to base First Direct in Leeds – and conservative RP speakers drip money and are frosty. They are associations so ingrained, they must be natural. Accent hierarchy and class system have always gone hand-in-hand, it’s assumed.
Except the pinnacle of poshness – conservative RP – is a parvenu. It only developed about three centuries ago, whereas some regional accents stretch back a thousand years. In courtly times, men of power – Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake – spoke with thick Devonshire accents. King James I was a Scot, and plenty of his descendants were German. Sounding like the bloke in the leather chair on the Fast Show only came into fashion in 1750, when the educated triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London decide to set itself apart, and chose a time-honoured weapon to do it. “Accents are not about communication or intelligibility,” says Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. They started as rudimentary security systems in prehistoric times, being an economical means of establishing whether the person outside your cave – whom you couldn’t see – was part of your group. If he spoke like you, he probably was. If he didn’t, you went out with club in hand.
The metaphorical clubs of the elite were lengthened vowels and a sound system as far removed as possible from the cockney masses. A cockney dropped an “h,” so RP emphasised it. A cockney put a glottal stop in “absolutely,” (absoloo’ly) so RP emphasised the t and added a “y” sound for good measure (absolyutely). Diphthongs (lengthened vowels, such as in fewer and say) were added in words commoners wouldn’t put them in (so, go get longer “o” sounds).
Pronunciation dictionaries set the art of speaking proper in stone (though George III once had to be corrected for his mispronunciation of “oblige”, which used to be “obleege”), the public school system consolidated it, and the Empire sent it worldwide. In 1922, Lord Reith chose posh as the voice of most authority for the BBC, as well as being the most widely understood. By then, it marked the boundaries of a perfectly delineated horizontal social class, where posh Aberdonians sounded like posh East Anglians, and strong Devonshire accents, in the seats of power, simply didn’t do. Everyone else spoke with an accent or dialect: Posh had a “sociolect.”
Not that other countries don’t have power vowels. In the classless north American society, East Coast Bostonian has ruled, and still does. But they’ve still been happy with two presidents sounding like ranchers. And veteran senator Jesse Helms’ southern twang has never stopped his bigoted opinions being taken seriously.
The Germans have their hochdeutsch, or high German, which has looked down on plattdeutsch, or the flat German of the northern regions. (Munich residents call Berliners Sauprussen, or pig Prussians, for the way they speak, which even the average English football hooligan probably wouldn’t come up with.) But a federal nation can’t afford to despise one region over another. The French come closest, with a contempt for regional twangs, a privileging of the Parisian, and even a language police, in the Academie Francaise, which determines pronunciation and forbids neologisms. Italian posh is trickier: The country only properly united 150 years ago. But the rule is there, sort of – northern good, southern bad – though fashions come and go. The recent elevation of the non-rolled R (r moscia) to poshness being particularly disturbing: Imagine a pwime-time where everyone speaks like Jonathan Ross.
But nowhere has the stranglehold of posh been so secure as here, nor its recent demise so spectacular. The Queen’s Christmas speech, in my youthful Christmases, involved a competition of who could imitate her weird pronunciation the best. My husbend and ay? My hesbund and ei? By 1990, I was at the Oxford Union debating society, when young Jacob Rees-Mogg, all floppy black hair and pinstripes, stood up to debate. He said a few words, and the audience roared with laughter. Hilarious! Jacob’s pretending to be Margaret Thatcher! Except he really did speak like that.
That accents change when people meet people is a linguistic rule of thumb. Decades of massive expansion of travel, wealth and mobility have made it difficult to do anything but. At the beginning of the century of the self, the cut-glass tones of Celia Johnson were required speaking on the big screen; by the end of it, the small screen had made them seem redundant, out-dated, mocked. The elitist security system was exposed: The country had been deferring to an accent spoken by only 5% of the population. Orf with its head.
Forced to mingle, posh has gone down the scale. David Crystal thinks the number of posh-speakers has halved, and is continually decreasing. The young posh have moved to modern RP, mostly, with a bit of Estuary English (south-eastern regional spoken by all radio and yoof presenters, somewhere between modern RP and cockney) thrown in for their friends. Last year, enterprising Australians discovered that even the Queen’s vowels – I’m heppy – had got commoner.
This is grand. If accent has denoted class, then accents breaking down mean class boundaries crumble too. In a way, says David Crystal. “I used to be able to pinpoint where anyone was from. Now, I’d get it wrong 9 times out of 10.” He says hundreds of thousands of teenagers – in a country considered bad at languages – are routinely accent bilingual (one for the street, one for the parents), and have access to a dozen. In general, most people’s accents are elastic: Tony Blair’s slippery accent (“aye” in Sedgfield, “oh, indeed,” in No 10) is typical: Flexibility and fitting in have taken over over from flaunting – wealth, prestige, class. Now people use accent in a more knowing way,” says Nik Coupland, director of Cardiff University’s Centre for Language and Communication. “They challenge the assumption of authenticity.” Slippery accents make decoding more difficult, and despising them must be harder too.
Unfortunately not. “I think the linguistic structure hasn’t moved as fast as the social changes,” says Nik Coupland. Officially, the BBC likes regional accents. But always the softer, “educated” variety. Kirsty Wark wouldn’t be on Newsnight if she spoke like Billy Connolly.
But the highest-profile minority accent gets the most stick. When House of Commons speaker “Gorbals” Mick Martin fired his secretary Charlotte Every for the same reason, there were no cries of discrimination. (Imagine a Sloane firing a Glaswegian for sounding too common.) Hollywood baddies are always English, and always toffs. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Tory candidacy is scuppered because he sounds too posh (though he lost the sympathy vote by proclaiming that “John Prescott’s accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf.”)
In 1997, the Institute of Personnel and Development announced that some accents were more marketable than others. Scottish will sell mobile phones – and banks, and cars, and anything else – but it won’t do for publishing. A northern diplomat friend, when he starts speaking, is often greeted with “but that’s not a Foreign Office voice!”
Studies on bigotry show that people are more affected by accent than colour. A posh-speaking dark skin gets less prejudice than a strongly regional-speaking white person. (Would Trevor McDonald be Britain’s favourite broadcaster if he didn’t speak conservative RP?) The silky poshness of Alan Rickman may have been great shorthand for nastiness in Die Hard, but accent prejudice isn’t comic. When psychologists play tapes of accents – a Scouse, a Brummie and an RP – and asked which was more likely to commit a crime, it’s never the posh one. Translate these prejudices to a court-room jury, and things get dark and troubled. “It’s easier to identify prejudice when it’s about colour,” says David Crystal. “But it’s difficult to illuminate when it’s about accent. Intolerance is still very strong.”
Of course, I’m immune to this. My childhood experience of accent prejudice gives me a moral high ground. Right, says Paul Coggle, author of Do you speak Estuary?. “Imagine your 747 captain speaking Scouse.” I do. “Would you think he had authority? Wouldn’t you have a slight hesitation?” I would. The people at Coleman’s know this, which is why their comedy pig speaks Brummie. (My mother’s Birmingham impersonation was almost as popular as her magic windscreen-wiper trick – look, I can make it go every five seconds).
When Americans are played recordings of accents considered ugly over here, they have no reaction. They don’t generally find them beautiful, ugly, unfriendly or dumb, just different ways of speaking English. There are some optimists who think the rise of Estuary, and the demise of posh (it’ll probably be gone by mid-century) mean we’re on the way to such accent egalitarianism. ‘Appen. But I bet there’ll always be some kid tied to a radiator somewhere for not speaking proper.
Published in the Independent Saturday magazine