Making Assumptions

Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com.

Sadie:                          This episode contains some swear words which I haven’t beeped because, you know, it’s a podcast about language. Anyway, sorry mum.

This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity.

This is Episode 1: Making Assumptions. In this episode I’ll be asking why do we find ourselves jumping to conclusions about someone as soon as we hear them speak? Where do our assumptions come from? And why is it that we can have such strong feelings about what accents we like and what ones we hate?

My friend Jenny didn’t grow up posh, but people often assume she did because of her accent, which, in her words, is a lot posher than she is.

Jenny:                         My mother didn’t really do anything, at least not anything legal. My dad did lots of different things, but he was a manual labourer and things like that. We were quite poor growing up, we weren’t well off or things like that. And so, I kind of felt a really -- that I had a really strong working-class identity and a voice that didn’t match that at all.

Sadie:                          Jenny was born in Nottingham and moved to the Borders when she was eight. Shortly after that she ended up in foster care, moving from home to home for the rest of her childhood. People who meet Jenny as a care leaver are often surprised when they hear her accent. People who know her by her accent first are often surprised when they find out that she used to be in care.

Jenny:                         Just after I’d finished uni, because I got a first, they were like let’s pay lip service to Jenny as the first kid in care in the Scottish Borders to go to uni. I met with a manager and a councillor and he was like “yeah, you’re very eloquent. That’s not what I was expecting.” And kind of making out that that was a compliment.

Sadie:                          After uni, Jenny went out to look for jobs. When she started going to job interviews, she found out that the accent that she’d always felt so disconnected from was weirdly beneficial. Even though she felt like it had little to do with who she was, people kept finding round about ways of telling her that it was something to be proud of.

Jenny:                         I was told in no uncertain terms that the reason, one of the reasons, I got my job, not just because of my qualifications, is because I could talk to clients.

Sadie:                          Jenny’s now doing a PhD. Unfortunately, it’s still pretty rare to find a PhD student who didn’t grow up well off. It’s particularly rare to find a PhD student who grew up in care. Jenny still struggles with feeling a bit out of place in the academic world. I asked her whether her accent is flexible enough to allow her to, well, pass.

Jenny:                         I think it’s flexible enough to pass but that -- I think that’s why I find it so annoying.

Sadie:                          Because you don’t want to pass all the time?

Jenny:                         I don’t want to pass all the time. I’m quite open about who I am, and where I’ve come from, and I really don’t care that people know I’m in foster care. That is part of -- that I was in foster care -- that’s part of my identity that I totally own because I don’t see why people make assumptions about kids in care. I think that’s really annoying. So I feel out of place underneath but for them they think it’s perfectly normal and natural, and why wouldn’t I be doing a PhD because I sound like I belong. And I think that’s worse than if I had a different accent. I wear my identity on my sleeve by telling people, but I don’t wear it the way I speak. And I wish that the two chimed so that I wouldn’t have to explain and challenge people’s assumptions about me.

Sadie:                          We all make assumptions about people based on the way they speak: the words they use, the way they pronounce them, even the way they link them together to form sentences.

How would you feel about me if I told you that I was, like, literally starving? Or that I don’t need to go to the shops because I’ve already went this week? Or that it wasn’t my fault because I never even done nothing?

I took my microphone and went to the Barras market in the East End of Glasgow. I asked people about how others respond to their accents.

What assumptions do you think people make about Glaswegian accents and do you think they’re right or not?

Mark Leslie:               Oh, they’re absolutely wrong. They think they’re rough, ready -- I think it’s the stigma that goes from the past. You say you come from Glasgow and it’s -- there is a big element of truth in it, I suppose. I mean it is a working-class place. There is all these things levelled at it but one thing it is that, sort of, tends to get missed in it is that it’s a really truthful place. And that’s the thing that -- that is why I keep coming back now. And I remember growing up when I was at college ye were sort of like -- even me saying “ye”, I was aware of that and I was aware I was being judged on that. So you absolutely tried to change your accent to be accepted, in some sort of ways as an equal. And the older I’ve got the more I’m beginning to -- like Billy Connelly -- I’m beginning to enjoy swearing. I’m beginning to love saying fuck off and things like that. Whereas, as a student you’d be like “oh, that’s no so good is it?” Things like that. Where now it’s like unleash the Glaswegian accent.

Female Voice:            Since childhood too, sometimes we’ve been made ashamed of some of our Scots voices and particularly in television and broadcasting. When I was wee, I remember hearing a Scots voice speaking on the telly and asked my mum what was wrong with this person’s voice because I’d never heard a Scottish person speaking on television.

Female Voice 2:         They always go “you’re a fiery Scottish girl, aren’t you?” And I’m like well I am but that -- it’s not just because of my accent, it’s who I am. But you could find anyone from Scotland and people from Scotland might not be fiery. It’s just when people assume. Sometimes I’ll say something, and I don’t mean to be angry, and somebody will be like “sorry, sorry.” And I’m like I’m not -- I’m not angry at you.

Sadie:                          We all respond to linguistic differences. It’s natural to have emotional responses to accents: liking those that we have positive associations with and disliking those that we have negative associations with. But I think the trouble is that we can forget that these responses are subjective. That they really say more about us then they do about the accents themselves. We can end up taking it for granted that certain accents, words, speech sounds, or grammatical structures are inherently attractive, friendly, aggressive, sloppy or incorrect rather than just different from the official standard.

Ewa’s doing a PhD in linguistics at Glasgow Uni. We work in the same department, but I specialise in sociolinguistics and she specialises in phonetics. What’s that you ask?

Ewa:                           It’s about studying sounds of speech, basically. That’s the most basic thing that you can --

Sadie:                          And right down into the details of the physiology of it, right?

Ewa:                           Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s right. So how we produce the sounds with our vocal tracts basically, yeah.

Sadie:                          Me and Ewa both study the details of how language works. How the little pops and clicks and purrs that we make with our lips and tongues and larynxes come together to form words and sentences, arguments and political speeches and podcasts.

One detail we’ve both learnt a bit about is the glottal stop.

When I say a word -- so if I was to say the word glottal, and I was speaking fast, and I was speaking to a friend I would normally say “glot-all” 

Ewa:                           Mm-hmm. Using the glottal stop. 

Sadie:                          When I say “glot-all”, that sound there in the middle -- I mean I guess I’ve always been told not to drop my “t’s”. Is it fair to call that dropping your “t’s”?

Ewa:                           Well, yeah, exactly that’s a good question. I don’t think it’s completely fair because there is a different sound instead of that “tuh” sound, right. If you were going to drop your “t” there completely it would be something like “gloll”.

Sadie:                          Ahh okay, yeah, so if I say -- so if I’m speaking more properly and formally, I would say “glot-tal”, and if I was to drop my “t’s” I would say “gloll”. What I’m really doing is more replacing the “t” with another sound.

Ewa:                           That’s it, mm-hmm.

Sadie:                          In phonetic terms, what exactly is a glottal stop?

Ewa:                           So you close your vocal folds or what people, in lay terms, refer to more as vocal cords. They’re not really like cords at all but that’s what people think of them as. That exact thing happens inside your larynx with your vocal cords: they close off, and then release the air, and there is this little explosion.

Sadie:                          You often hear people say that glottal stops are lazy or sloppy; that it’s just people missing out the letter “t” because they can’t be bothered talking properly. But then next to Ewa’s description of the phonetic properties of the glottal stop, that doesn’t sound quite right. And anyway, when the Queen speaks, she drops her “r’s” saying farmer like “fah-mer”, and I’ve never heard anyone call her speech sloppy. 

So all my life I’ve been told -- I remember being a kid and being told it’s “wat-ter bot-tle” not “wat-er bot-le” and being kind of scolded for that. And being told, specifically, being told that if you say “wat-er bot-le’” it sounds lazy, or sloppy, or like I just can’t be bothered saying “tuh”. I mean, is it harder -- does it take more effort to say “tuh”? Does it take more effort to say “water bottle” than it does to say “wat-er bot-le”?

Ewa:                           I wouldn’t be sure what takes more effort really. There could be a study to measure how much energy people used to produce this sound as opposed to the other sound. I would assume probably not much of a difference; it’s just a different sound.

Sadie:                          When you look at language so up close you can start to become a bit detached. It’s like when you zoom into an image on a computer screen until it turns into pixels and stops meaning anything. You can start to wonder why anyone would care. But when you zoom out and the pictures become the bigger picture it’s obvious that we really do care. As soon as you connect speech sounds to people, they become more than just noises.

What would you say to someone who said to you that they just think glottal stops sound horrible and lazy and sloppy and terrible?

Ewa:                           I would say that I guess that’s just their opinion, right? I mean, think of -- I thought about it in this way. For example, if a particular group of people that may be for some -- for any reason -- is not very liked by society -- doesn’t matter, where for some, whatever the reason -- starts wearing a particular colour. Let’s say they wear blue. Everyone else who doesn’t want to be associated with that group will say “oh, we’re not going to wear that colour”, right? It’s very much the same thing.

Sadie:                          Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, yeah. So it’s kind of -

Ewa:                           It’s not to do with the colour itself because the colour is just a colour. Yeah, it’s just a colour. So it’s the same about the sound; it’s just a sound but people have their opinions and attitudes towards things. That’s probably where it came from.

Sadie:                          Yeah.

We often think of our attitudes to accents as aesthetic preferences, but these attitudes are strongly linked to our attitudes to the social groups that use them: to our experiences with individual people and to what we’ve been taught to take for granted.

There are power hierarchies at work that can even lead to us thinking that our own language use is substandard. 

Female Voice:            I don’t like common Glasgow accent, [sounds like] to come whispering that one. And do you know what? Sometimes I forget and I actually -- if my mother was -- if -- she’d turn in her grave sometimes because I come up with some slang. My mum would have slapped me. I go and I think where did I get that word? How did I manage to get a Glasgow word like that?

Sadie:                          The Glasgow accent is particularly maligned and one thing you hear a lot is that people just don’t understand Glaswegian accents. That’s something a lot of people told me at the Barras, like this barber who spoke to me while he was cutting a client’s hair.

Has there ever been any times you’ve felt your accent’s been -- got in the way of anything or put you at a disadvantage? 

Male Voice:                Aye. One time when I was trying to order something in KFC in Oxford Street, in London. Thought I was going to have a fuckin nervous breakdown, man, because they just couldn’t get it. They just couldn’t understand ma accent. It was impenetrable man. No matter how much I slowed it down. I ended up leaving without any food.

Sadie:                         What were you trying to order?

Male voice:                A chicken burger and a zinger meal.

Sadie:                         And they just weren’t getting it

Male voice:                Yeah. I think they thought I was trying to say a chicken burger in a zinger meal. There’s already a fucking chicken burger in a zinger meal. I just wanted a chicken burger on the side of a zinger meal which was a chicken burger and a zinger meal.

Sadie:                         Oh, so that’s partly that it’s a weird order as well as your accent.                              

                                    But scientifically speaking, no accent’s easier to understand than any other. Whether or not you understand an accent largely just depends on how familiar you are with it, as well as whether or not you expect to understand it.

Female voice:             Because people, some people, don’t understand my acc -- some people don’t try -- that’s the -- a lot of the time its people don’t try and understand your accent. They just expect you to speak “proper”. I’m putting air quotes up by the way for the listeners. When it’s like “speak properly”, I’m like “I am speaking properly”, I’m not -- it’s not like I’m speaking like -- I don’t think I do -- obviously I have a strong accent, but I don’t sound ridic -- you can’t un -- you can’t not understand what I’m saying. I speak properly.

Sadie:                         What do you think people mean when they say “speak properly”?

Female voice:             They mean speak the Queen’s English. No, I’m not from fuckin -- I’m not even from England in the first place. Like fuck off.

 Sadie:                         Like the Queen’s English is proper for the Queen but…

Female voice:             Exactly. I do have a lot of friends that speak RP, received pronunciation or whatever, and that’s fine, and I don’t ever -- yeah, I do make fun of them sometimes, but they make fun of me so that’s fine. But I can under -- I’ve never had a difficulty understanding what anyone from anywhere in the UK is saying, so why do people not try and understand what I’m saying? It’s not even that they can’t, it’s that they don’t try. That is the thing that annoys me. No, it is! They don’t try and like tune their head into listening to what I’m saying they just think “ah, she’s Scottish you can’t understand what she’s saying. Repeat that. Speak slower.” I’m like I will but also at the same time just actually sit and try and understand what I’m saying. 

Sadie:                         Do you think it’s to do with familiarity as well? Because obviously you don’t tend to get as many people with strong regional accents on the TV.

Female voice:             Yeah, yeah. It is, yeah. One hundred per cent because even when you get people with regional accents on the TV they do speak slower, and they do speak in -- whenever you hear a Scottish person on the TV you don’t go automatically they’re fae Glasgow. You go they’re probably fae Edinburgh.

Sadie:                         Because I wonder sometimes if the reason that we can understand people speaking RP, even if we haven’t met that many people who speak RP, is because we see it on the TV and hear it on the radio all the time.

Female voice:             Exactly. It is probably that. Probably 100 per cent that.

Sadie:                          Language is often used as a way of attacking or laughing at the most precarious groups in society: young people, working class people, and migrants, who often arrive in the UK with several languages but are seen as deficient if they speak English with a foreign accent.

                                    Are you aware of your own accent in Glasgow?

Female voice:             No, I mean yes, because my Scottish pals keep telling me about it. But [inaudible] for me, I’ve got the feeling that for French person my accent is very soft but all my English, Scottish friends they say, “oh my god you speak like ‘Allo ‘Allo!” Like in the, you know…

Sadie:                          In this case it’s just harmless teasing but it isn’t always. Working in schools over the past few years, I’ve met young migrants who are really badly bullied just because they sound foreign.

Language can become a weapon to attack people with, but it can also be a means of fighting back: building community, refusing to conform. I think there’s no doubt that using language not sanctioned by the establishment can hold power as well as disadvantage. 

Male voice:                I’ve done a lot of community work, years and years ago, and I know by having a certain accent -- strangely enough it can work in your favour though. For example, in here it’s like “how- how’s it goin?” That compared to say something like “hello” can make a huge difference. Two of them mean the same thing but the presentation of both are quite different.

Sadie:                          In school we’re taught about correct grammar but there’s nothing especially correct about it. It’s just the type of grammar which is used by the most powerful groups in society and which is therefore enshrined in grammar books and passed on through education. Yes, it’s useful to be able to use it when you enter the workplace. It’s also useful to own a suit but that doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently wrong with jeans. Suits and standardised grammar are symbolic, like using a secret handshake at a job interview. Showing our understanding of and willingness to follow a particular set of social rules. From speaking to people, I think it’s clear that the Queen’s English isn’t the only type of language in the UK that has any power. If it was, surely, we would all want to speak it all the time and that’s just not the case.

For some people, having grown up with a non-standard variety of English is seen as a burden but not everyone sees it like this. And many people feel strongly attached to the ways in which their language use differs from the standard. Like Jenny at the start of the episode, my friend Collette told me about a run in she had with someone who assumed that telling her that she was well spoken i.e., posh enough to pass, was a compliment.

Collette:                      I had a session with a voice coach because I was working at a theatre company and they were like “would anybody on staff like a session with a voice coach?” and I was like “yeah, definitely. Nice freebie.”

Sadie:                          So that was not for the -- just for fun?

Collette:                      Yeah. Totally, it was for fun and it was really nice. I was talking to him and I was like “oh, I think that the old East London accent can get a bit stronger when I’m a bit nervous or something” and he was like “oh, darling I don’t hear that in your voice at all.” And I felt really affronted. How dare you.

Sadie:                          I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.

Collette:                      I’m sure he did, I’m sure he did. “Oh, darling you have a lovely voice you couldn’t tell you were a commoner.”

Sadie:                          No regional accents, no.

Collette:                      I was like that’s how you can tell that -- that I went to comprehensive school and for someone to take that away from me I just -- yeah, I felt annoyed about that.

Sadie:                          In school I was taught that there was good language and there was bad language and that was that. I always had a sense that there must be more to it than that, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask the right questions. When I started studying linguistics at uni, I found out that once you start to examine language beyond ideas of correct grammar and sloppy speech, things start to get so much more interesting.

In the coming episodes, I’ll be talking about the ability that we have to use different voices with different people, how kids learn to talk, how our singing voices relate to our speaking voices, and what it means to be multilingual under the overbearing shadow of the English language.

I’ll be releasing a new episode every fortnight. You can listen on the website accentricity-podcast.com and you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For updates, follow the podcast @accentricitypod on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. There’s a page on the website which allows you to donate to the podcast. Donations will go towards production of series two, which I’m already working on some ideas for.

Thanks to: John McDiarmid for production support, Seb Philp for making the music, all of the amazing contributors for this episode, and Oisín Kealy for making the excellent point about the Queen dropping her “r’s”.

See you next time.