It wasn’t just Londoners born near a certain church in Bow who grimaced when Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep, Bert, opened his mouth in the 1964 musical, Mary Poppins, an offense which he apologized more than half a century later.
But if Van Dyke killed the cockney accent, Londoners, and southerners more generally, seem to be among the worst at spotting people imitating their accents, with northerners, Scots and the Irish performing better.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge tested how well volunteers in the UK and Ireland could spot people faking accents after hearing two to three seconds of audio clips.
The volunteers were asked to rate sentences composed to emphasize differences between seven accents, namely the North East of England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex and Received Pronunciation (RP). For example, “He thought a bath would make him happy”, reveals southerners turning “bath” into “barth”.
People who heard either of the fake accents spotted them almost two-thirds of the time and, not surprisingly, the hit rate was typically higher when a person heard someone fake their own accent.
But the study found marked regional differences. When played recordings of people imitating accents found in Scotland, the northeast of England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, listeners from those regions identified 65% to 85% of the fakes.
In contrast, when those from London, who spoke mostly RP, and those from Essex heard people faking their accents, they spotted them 50% to 70% of the time. Bristolians fared only slightly better, rooting out 50% to 75% of the fakes.
“We found that people from further south in the UK are more likely to be worse at this,” said Dr Jonathan Goodman, an anthropologist and first author of the study.
Are Southern English accents simply easier to fake than others? Goodman thinks not. Instead, he sees cultural evolution at work. A person’s accent is a sign of their social identity, and the history of tension across the UK may have brought northerners, Scots and others closer together, making them more attuned to outsiders.
“Let’s say you come from an area in the UK that doesn’t have a good relationship with the capital,” Goodman said. “There may be a negative out-group sentiment that leads you to focus more emphasis on your social identity, on your accent. It’s speculation, but it’s my best guess as to what’s going on.” Details are published in Evolutionary Human Sciences.
A similar effect has been seen before. In 1963, William Labov, an American linguist, found that the inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts began emphasize their accent when they were inundated with wealthy summer visitors.
Dr Alex Baratta, a reader in language and education at the University of Manchester, said it was worth asking why groups like the Irish might feel a need to be on the lookout for outsiders.
“A central reason is indeed to protect themselves from outsiders, especially given attacks, literal and figurative, such as Irish jokes told in fake Irish accents, over the years from outsiders,” he said. “It might help to explain to African Americans that it is probably better to locate individuals, black or white, that influence the sounds of Ebonics, a dialect spoken by some African Americans.
“Certain accents come with more emotional baggage than others, not based on sounds, but on the negative stereotyping of the speakers. So, such speakers reinforce, and are proud of, how they speak, leaving their accent a social marker not to be messed with, especially if it was mocked by outsiders.”
For Van Dyke, and more recently Russell Crowe, which it lost when a Radio 4 presenter noticed a hint of Irish in his Robin Hood, accent is just the beginning. “It’s the impersonation of the whole identity,” Goodman said. “To be an effective actor, you need to capture the identity more fully than just the phonemes associated with the accent itself.”
