When who you are is relevant to what you think about accents

 A tweet from last week about London children's accents sparked a bit of twitter fuss and made me think about how the identity of the opinion-holder matters as much as the identity of the person the opinion is about. 

I think we can all agree that 'punching down' is bad, namely criticising or mocking someone in a position of less power than you. This would be like a very senior academic calling out a junior scholar in front of a room full of people at a conference, for instance - it's not cool. The opposite scenario may be confrontational, but the power dynamics mean that it probably isn't bullying in the second instance. Similarly, social groups have different levels of power or authority and so comedians' jokes can fall flat if they appear to be punching down: if you want to make jokes about poor people they'd better be couched in a lot of understanding and solidarity, whereas jokes about rich people are pretty fair game. 

The tweet was as follows: 

My sister has just started work teaching primary school kids in North London and has informed me that everybody at the school has such strong accents they don't say "Thoughtful", they just say "Fortfuw" and I don't know how she gets through the day without laughing at them.

— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) November 25, 2020

OK, so we have young children as the subject, so relative powerlessness, and working class children at that (we can tell from their accents), so a double whammy. Is this awful and mean? You'd think so, wouldn't you. Accent discrimination is a real insidious and nasty thing, a form of classism that often masks other prejudices and tends to be presented as concern or commentary on how people choose to live their lives. So this apparent mockery of these kids who do what linguists call th-fronting (pronouncing 'thought' and 'fort' the same) and l-vocalisation (pronouncing 'l' like a 'w') drew a bit of criticism from my linguist babes who are always on the lookout for injustice and sticking up for people who need a bit of help (trust me, there's a lot of Bad Opinions about language on the internet). 

The guy who tweeted it is Australian, and lives and works in Australia, and for me that puts a whole nother spin on things. Suddenly this isn't just some guy mocking the kids for speaking in an accent he thinks is 'wrong', it's delight in an utterly unfamiliar accent which probably sounds totally adorable if you don't hear it spoken around you or associate it with Eastenders. Maybe it has connotations of Victorian chimney sweeps and street urchins as in Oliver! and it seems anachronistic to find that it's just the everyday language of his sister's class. While it probably doesn't help with the overall ideal of removing the stigma of these features of London English, it also doesn't feel the same as people on the internet suggesting that the children should learn to 'speak properly' so that people take them more seriously. 

Southern privilege

One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I look forward to it eagerly. It's funny, but it's also clever and insightful and often poignant. This week, he threw in a comment about 'doing funny accents' that was so spot-on in its identification of the problem of centring privilege.

Just to take a step back: we normally think about male privilege, white privilege, or straight privilege. It doesn't meant that (say) men don't have problems, or never face discrimination, but that they don't face the kind of systematic discrimination that those who aren't men face, while of course they may face systematic discrimination of other kinds (e.g. you might be a gay man, or a black man, and have male privilege but not straight or white privilege). In the grand scheme of things, northerners aren't who you think of as facing the worst discrimination, but nevertheless, there is a sort of 'southern privilege'. (North and south here refer to England, by the way - in itself this minimises the existence of the other UK countries and especially Scotland.) This shows up mostly in accent discrimination, which can be a proxy for class discrimination.

Justin talks about the way that people frequently imitate a 'northern' accent when he tells them that he is from Yorkshire. (UGH by the way - 'the north' is a big place with a lot of different accents.) He specifically mentions the way that they say 'oop north', and the way they think this must pronounced like 'poop' because they don't realise it's just the vowel like in 'book' but written with a double 'o' to emphasise the difference from the southern pronunciation. And here comes the part that I'd never even thought about before, which is that having this special spelling to indicate the northern pronunciation is in itself a staggeringly southern-centric way of doing things. As Justin points out, there is no northern equivalent of an approximation of the southern pronunciation (he writes it as 'ap', which is pretty close to the IPA for the RP pronunciation). The word 'up' spells both the southern and the northern pronunciation; the letter 'u' represents both the sounds /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. To write 'up' as 'oop' leaves it as representing only the southern pronunciation, ignoring the northern one altogether.

In this situation, as always, the people in the position of relative power fix the language in a way that positions the less powerful ones as 'others', not the norm.