I was watching a short video concerning very poor people in England. To my American ears, their dialect made them sound uneducated and frankly, kind of dumb. I am not saying that they actually are that.
I am curious as to what extent, if any, their dialect may have affected their ability to get better jobs and move upwards economically.
So, are there negative biases in the UK towards certain dialects and if so, is it common for such biases to effect upward economic mobility?
A report from the OECD pegs educational opportunities as one of the best indicators of inter-generational social mobility:
https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf
Dunno if regional accents are considered in that, but it’s not mentioned in the summary of the relevant chapter:
Government social safety net policies also play a role:
IANA British person and have no direct experience with this issue, but apparently there’s some research on the subject.
What do the poor English sound like? Do you have a link to the video?
Sounding uneducated when you talk could affect your upward economic mobility in a whole lot of places.
My Texan ears didn’t really hear anything that made them sound particularly dumb or unintelligent to me. Could just be that I expect to hear them using English that doesn’t sound quite natural to me.
I do spend a lot of time conversing with people from a wide educational background for whom English, and especially my own version of English, is not their first(or second) language and have noticed that a persons command of the language even if a native speaker is not as indicative of intelligence as I had thought when I was younger.
I look foward to hearing what people from that region think of their dialect.
British English is heavily marked by regional and class accents. By dialects, to a much lesser extent.
As regards dialect, not having a fluent command of standard English would be signficantly career-limiting. But that would affect relatively few people; the majority of British people who use another dialect of British English can switch to standard English at will.
Accent is a different matter. It depends. Some regional accents are positively advantageous, at least in some professions - educated Scottish speech is considered to sound trustworthy, for example, and is said to be an advantage in making a career in medicine or finance. But accents associated with areas of social deprivation can definitely be a handicap in some career paths.
This is a complex business, because the extent to which your accent may advantage or disadvantage in career terms you depends not only on what accent you have but also on what career you want to pursue and (of course) on where you want to pursue it. The UK is still very class-bound, and success in a lot of professions is strongly correlated with your parents’ careers, your social networks and your access to educational opportunities. Your accent sends a lot of strong signals about all these things. Even if the signals are, in your particular case, misleading, they still affect how others see you and respond to you.
I watched the video linked in the OP and there wasn’t anything in there that I would call ‘dialect’ - just typical English>Northern>Lancashire>Burnley accents (I’ve listed these as a sort of rough hierarchy - I think most native English speakers could determine these were specifically accents from England, anyone from England could tell you they were ‘Northern’ accents, I can usually distinguish a ‘Lancashire’ accent from its neighbouring Yorkshire and Cumbrian accents - but being a southerner, I couldn’t distinguish between, say, Burnley and Blackpool accents, so that last category is an assumption on my part, based on the fact the film is from Burnley).
As far as the question in the OP goes, I think UDS1 has nailed it. There is a lot of prejudice on both sides of the north/south divide, and some of it is rooted in truth I think, but I don’t think most people judge intelligence based on accent.
Hmm, I guess I should have said accent and not dialect. I was working under the assumption that pronunciation is at least one possible criteria of the definition of dialect.
di·a·lect
n.
1.
a. A regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, especially a variety of speech differing from the standard literary language or speech pattern of the culture in which it exists: Cockney is a dialect of English.
Note the “or” in there.
A test of this for Engliksh folk is to try imagine people with certain dialects speaking on tv as spokespersons in their particulare field.
So, for example, imagine a government minister for health or a senior medical consultant with a string Geordie accent - nope, not happening.
Conversely try to imagine a refuse collector speaking absolute pure Queen’s English - sure it could happen but it would be unexpected and perhaps jarring.
This sort of prejudice comes about for a reason, social perceptions and class.
Class is incredibly deep rooted in the UK, it should not happen but even before birth the hospital provision for expectant mothers is noticeably better in certain areas, and this extends right through school catchment zones to employoment.
It makes me wonder why “pure Queen’s English” makes the speaker -sound- more intelligent to me than someone from Burnley. Obviously the content of what they are saying is more important. I am just speaking of an impression.
And so that leads me to curiosity about the question in my OP. I think the question has been answered by UDS1. Thanks all.
A high profile case of this is Steph McGovern, the main business presenter on the BBC’s much watched BBC Breakfast morning news show. She has a thick but perfectly comprehensible northern accent. This is her on the feedback she gets from viewers:
“You would think that after nearly two years in the job, people would be used to my Teesside tones. To be fair most are, but there are still some viewers who can’t accept that someone with my accent can have a brain. It means that I regularly get abuse about it. I’ve had tweets questioning whether I really did go to university because surely I would have lost my accent if I did; a letter suggesting, very politely, that I get correction therapy; and an email saying I should get back to my council estate and leave the serious work to the clever folk.”
“The other misconception that comes through in my “fan mail” is that people with regional accents can’t use the English language correctly. I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says “less” when they should have said “fewer”. But my “poor” sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my “grass” rhymes with mass, not farce. What’s wrong with that?
“It’s inevitable that not everyone will like me, and that some will find me annoying. That’s fine. All presenters deal with that. What’s scary is the ignorance about what having a regional accent means, or indeed doesn’t mean. It certainly doesn’t equal ignorance “
And also on how some within the BBC view her:
She also said she was inspired by the example of her editor Alison Ford who died earlier this month from cancer.
“She was the woman who took a gamble on me when other managers thought she was mad. Despite being a business journalist at the BBC for ten years, working behind the scenes on our high-profile news programmes, I was viewed by some in the organisation to be “too common for telly”. I remember at the end of one BBC job interview being told by the manager: “I didn’t realise people like you were clever.” Sad, but true.”
(The BBC is not short of Oxbridge educated types with the “right” kind of accent who think they know who the “right” kind of people are).
A strong regional accent does tend to be a marker of what class you sit in. People who have been to private school will tend to have very neutral/RP accents, with perhaps only a hint of the region they come from (I am such a person). It means I can basically fit in anywhere, in any Board Room, and no one will think I’m poorly educated.
A strong regional accent will frequently tag you as from a working class background. These days, that isn’t the professional suicide it used to be, and you’ll hear many more regional accents from news presenters and even politicians. But it does give a glimpse into your background, in a way regional accents probably don’t in the US.
Read of that what you will.
I would guess this is an example of conditioning. When you watch films/tv with English characters, the ones who speak QE/RP will be the ones in charge - the officers, the professors, the bosses, the literal King. The ones speaking with regional accents will be the ones being told what to do. They may have good qualities - loyalty, for example, or they may be the scum of the earth - but they will not be presented as intellectuals, strategists, visionaries or any other kind of thinker. At best they may be narrowly shrewd, or sly. Their place is to follow not lead. Biggles and Algy fly the planes, lovable cockney Ginger fixes them. Good King Harry leads armies, Pistol gets hanged for stealing. Idiot George is a lieutenant; idiot Baldrick is a private. And so on.
There are also different components here: accent/timbre of voice, dialect/vocabulary/turn of phrase, and articulacy/clarity of diction. People can still have a distinct regional accent and use local dialect and still be perfectly clear.There are plenty of other examples of the kind Steph McGovern experiences (some people think every BBC announcer should sound like Alvar Lidell); but what certainly can hold people back is over-slangy and gabbled/slurred diction.
We absolutely associate strong accents with being uneducated or ‘common’. Not saying it’s right, but it definitely happens. The flip side is that speaking closer to Queen’s English will get you seen as a snob in working class circles.
I know my Dad lost most of his- which was very similar to this Burnley accent, pretty much next town over- when he went to University, even though he went to Uni in Manchester, also very close and pretty similar as local accents go, so there would have been little problem with practical communication. He can turn it back on if he wants, but people really do expect an educated person to have a mild accent at most. My uncle, Dad’s brother, stayed in working class jobs and had no further education; he kept his accent far more, even after 30 years living in Australia.
Even working somewhere like in restaurants, people who work both front-of-house and in the kitchen will soften their accents when out front, then put it back on when they go back to the kitchen. I’ve even seen it when we’re talking people from multiple counties- out front, everyone tries to sound as close to Queen’s English as possible to sound smart for the public, then a whole range of accents reappear when there’s just staff around, as everyone tries to sound less posh and more like part of the team.
I personally think it’s a mistake to view accents in the UK as purely regional; they’re more about social grouping. To take an example, I used to work with a mixed-race guy in Bristol who had a noticeable Jamaican accent. I happen to know that he’s never even visited Jamaica and was brought up entirely by his Mum, who was white and from Liverpool, and saw his Dad - from Jamaica- maybe once or twice a year from the time he was a baby. He just copied the guys with the accent he identified with, rather than pick up either the Bristolian accent or his mother’s.
If you want a particular social status, you copy that group’s accent, if you can.
Not trying to put you on the spot, but how does your view of this snip change if we substitute “education” for “intelligence”?
IMO/IME a lot of younger people, and certainly me when I was young, often conflate education with intelligence.
Up through graduating whatever is your (any your) personal final level of schooling, the fact almost every peer you deal with shares your educational level has a lot to do with it. That conditioning takes some years after leaving school to more fully wear off.
Both posts by the OP @by-tor seem to fall for the same conflation.
I’m not sure. The point I had in mind when I wrote that was very similar to the point you made in your reply.
My formal education stopped at the tenth grade. I don’t use a lot of fancy words in conversation and I avoid using them even more when I’m talking to educated folks like engineers and project managers. I probably sound dumb to a lot of these people, but I do understand the big words and technical language they use as it applies to my field very well, and outside of it to some extent as well.
I’ve made it as far on four letter words as a lot of these guys have made on ten dollar words and I guess I’m kinda sensitive about it all.
Well you say “neutral / RP” but there’s a big difference between those two.
I speak very neutral English. Fellow Brits cannot tell what area of the UK I come from. And non-Brits often cannot tell I am British.
While I don’t get negative discrimination from my lack of an accent, I do feel I miss out on some of the benefits that speaking Posh English (we can call it RP, but IIRC there’s a newer terminology) still has.
Me too. My paternal line comes from central Hampshire, where we stereotypically sound like farmers/yokels (as judged by people from other areas) - my dad made a conscious effort to adopt a more formal, Queen’s English style, and to broaden his vocabulary and ours, in an explicit attempt to climb the class ladder.
This rubbed off on me and permanently formed my speech patterns, and in turn, those rubbed off on my own children (and they were mocked at school for being ‘posh’, even though their behaviour was generally considerably less snobby and pretentious than their peers). I sometimes get the same reaction from people when I speak in public on YouTube; some people assume I am ‘posh’ and privileged* because of the way they perceive me to sound.
In my own career, my accent, dialect and vocabulary, influenced by my dad’s efforts, definitely swung things in my favour in job interviews (I know because it was discussed in the interview)
So it is a two-edged sword; people will judge based on accent, dialect and vocab, and some of those judgments will be positive or negative, regarding the same voice.
But those two edges are not equally sharp; people who judge me negatively as ‘a posh twat’ generally had no influence over what happened next - they were typically just vocal critics; people who judged me positively, in the context of say, a job interview or an application for a contract, often had the opportunity to back up their judgment with something that could change things to my advantage.
That said, there are many different facets to this, and some regional accents, whilst they may not be considered ‘high class’, may still be regarded in a positive way - for example, speakers with Yorkshire accents are often considered to be honest, shrewd and no-nonsense.
*(I’d be a fool to deny that my upbringing did not confer privilege; any decent parent wants to create a better life for their children, and my parents did)