Working-Class Accents and the Perpetual Piss-Take
I love accents. I’ve got what I would probably describe as a mid-strength Mackem (Sunderland) accent, something definitely identifiable but maybe one that’s had the edges shaved off it by years of working in media and being gently pressured (bullied) to ‘be intelligible.’ This isn’t my experience alone, many people with ‘traditional’ working-class accents have spent their working lives in a battle to be accepted without having to put on a daft voice and be something they’re not. The BBC didn’t experiment with working class accents until the early 40s and even then, discovered that listeners were ‘less inclined to believe the news’ when it wasn’t read in RP.
‘They sound thick’
‘Why can’t they pronounce their Gs?’
‘God I’d hate that accent’
I used to laugh off accent mocking – and this is different to your friends and gentle banter, I’m not that fragile – but now I’ve learned to reply with, ‘it’s funny how deriding someone’s accent is one of the few remaining accepted forms of prejudice isn’t it,’ which tends to shut it down pretty effectively.
I delight in accents. My shit superpower is being able to pick out an accent even in those who’ve had it forced out of them. A few years ago, we were interviewing a lovely man who has a completely ‘neutral’ RP accent. Listening to him in the headphones while recording him, I could hear a lilt of something, just a tiny thing in the way he said his Rs. I asked him if he’d spent time in Scotland or Ireland perhaps. He was shocked, pleased, ‘I’m from Belfast but I thought school and the army had completely erased any trace of my accent, nobody ever realises.’ What a shame, I thought; our identities are so often tied to our accents and where we grew up that to have it forcibly taken from you seems like a form of abuse or at the very least, cultural erasure.
My accent apparently gets broader when I’m with my family, it’s not a conscious thing and likewise I’ve never tried to rid myself of my accent (why would I, it’s mint) but after years of being careful to be understood, or not considered ‘thick’ I guess it just relaxes back into where it’s safe and known.
Which brings me to a particular irritation, people writing accents, more specifically those who have ‘neutral’ accents writing those of the working class. I read a piece on Adele in Vogue yesterday
“’Ello, I’m Adele. I’m alright, ‘ow are you?”
It rankled. Immediately the daft voice in my head read it in an Eliza Doolittle or Dick Van Dyke (circa Mary Poppins) style. Because the first thing that springs to mind is parody. What was the need to write it like that? The writer understood her and indeed wasn’t trying to be offensive, but he was clearly delighted with her accent, ‘charmed’ as Neil Kulkarni described it, equally aghast. He and another Twitter user reminded me of journalists’ regular tendency to spell fuck as ‘fook’ when said by anybody ‘from the North.’ Another user posted a piece by Ben Fogle where he describes an encounter with a taxi driver, written in cringe-worthy phonetics. Tim Bush pointed out that you don’t see ‘posh’ accents written this way. That hit me quite hard because he’s spot on, it tends very much to only be a working-class thing (and ‘foreign’ accents, of course, but that’s an article all of its own) where a writer is so entertained by the way we speak that they simply can’t ignore the itching in their hands that insists they write it all down, syllable for syllable.
I’m taken back to senior school where an old ‘posh’ teacher would constantly try to correct conversations with my friends until the point where I said to him, ‘look, if I was writing, I wouldn’t write it down like this because I understand the ‘rules’ of writing and grammar, but when we’re speaking it’s not ‘wrong’ and doesn’t need to be corrected, it’s colloquial.’ It sticks in my head because I find myself, all these years later, more or less saying the same thing time and again. Our accents, our colloquialisms aren’t ‘wrong,’ they aren’t something to be corrected or amused by. They’re a living, breathing record of our history. All the words we’ve picked up, or made up, along the way are our story’s path, they’re part of our identity and culture. It’s time to stop apologising for that.
