You say bathroom like “barth”? Would you put a “plaster” on a cut? Does it matter if you don’t? Yes, unfortunately it does, say academics, who argue that accentism is alive and well in Britain by 2022.
A research team will be set up next week at the British Academy’s large headquarters overlooking London’s shopping center, illustrating a large-scale project that explores the prejudices against North American accents. English and its speakers.
On many levels the subject of how people talk is funny. But it’s also important, researchers say, for the “profound” negative social, economic, and educational implications for speakers with denigrated accents.
“This is the prejudice that may dare to utter his name,” said Dr. Robert McKenzie, who is leading the Northumbria University project. “We are not allowed to be biased in terms of gender, we are not allowed to be biased in terms of sexual orientation.”
But denigrating accents are still allowed, he said. “You just have to watch an episode of The Simpsons to see how the people of the southern United States are portrayed. It’s amazing, I think people still get away with it.”
For four years, McKenzie and his team have been studying how the English evaluate English accents in the North and South. They have examined explicit and implicit prejudices, that is, unconscious.
For people with a strong northern accent, the conclusions are not good. “People think speakers in the north of England are less intelligent, less ambitious, less polite, etc., just because of the way they speak,” McKenzie said.
“On the other hand, people in the South are believed to be more ambitious, smarter.”
The people of the north were also “stereotyped as people of the salt of the earth kind, extroverted and trustworthy.”
McKenzie’s study found large differences in self-reported and implicit biases. “The negativity towards speaking northern English or speaking northern English was much more extreme, much more intense when looking at the implicit level.
“This tells us that on a conscious level people are less prejudiced than before, but on an implicit level we still have these biases.”
A century ago, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman despise him.”
That may not be the case today, but prejudices remain, McKenzie said. “The north of England is less and less stigmatized, but change is very, very slow.
“It’s easy to look very poetic and tell people that they shouldn’t be prejudiced, but it’s important. We find that children with stigmatized accents are less likely to get high grades in school. People are more likely to be convicted in court, less likely to be offered a job after an interview, less likely to have access to social housing.
“These things have real-world implications.”
Each year the British Academy opens its doors for a summer exhibition of the research work it has funded, which is presented as a “free festival of ideas for curious minds”.
It has been online for the past two years. This year, McKenzie and his team will be one of 12 participating projects, with guests invited to come and talk about their own experience of accent prejudice or participate in interactive activities.
This will include listening to the English accents of the North and the South and they will also be asked the tricky question of where the North of England or the South of England begins.
“That should be interesting,” McKenzie said. “People in the south tend to place the south as a starting point just above London, while my Newcastle students put the south just below Middlesbrough.”
He expects politicians to come and support the project and its campaign so that accents are a feature protected by the Equality Act.
“Just as people shouldn’t have gender bias or prejudice against fat or thin people, we shouldn’t have bias against accents,” McKenzie said.
McKenzie pointed to Labor’s Jess Phillips as an example of a politician who experiences accentism.
Another less obvious political victim was Jacob Rees-Mogg. “It was a long time ago it was presented to parliament in Fife, they were obviously putting it to the test,” McKenzie said. “He said that he felt that he was suffering at the polls because of his accent, that people would not vote for him because they saw him as a stranger. So it works in both ways. “
The British Academy summer showcase will take place from 17 to 18 June.