Accent Implying Intelligence

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. We got an email from Samantha Minschel. She’s a new graduate of Widener University just outside of Philadelphia.

And Grant, she wrote us to share a story from her freshman year. Wanted us to comment on it. Seems her close friend Charlotte was raised in New Jersey, but her father is from England, so Charlotte has sort of a half-British, half-American accent.

And after Samantha introduced Charlotte to her doormate Julie, Julie reacted by saying Charlotte sounded stuck up and snobby.

And Samantha thought for a moment and then said to Julie, oh, well, she’s not stuck up. She’s British.

And they’ve all since become great friends. But it’s left her wondering why it is that Americans often attach intelligence or snobbishness to a British accent.

And as it turns out, Samantha is a big Anglophile. And so she’s familiar enough with the language of England to know that not all British accents reflect such a highly educated sound.

And so she’s wondering why is it that Americans tend to lump the Brits all together and assume that they’re smarter or snobby?

Well, there’s a couple of questions here. Actually, instead of just one, the one question is, do Americans really lump them together? And I think as we have more exposure to British media, particularly on television, lots of people watching Downton Abbey, for example, the new Doctor Who that has been on for a number of years now, I think people’s understanding of accents in North America is a little more refined than it was.

A little, I think.

Right? But the larger question is, why do some accents take on a little more prestige?

Exactly.

And maybe a third question is, why do we react to that prestige either positively or negatively?

So it sounds like in this case, she saw the accent as sophisticated and then decided that it was stuck up.

Right.

Exactly.

Whereas some people might hear the accent, hear it as sophisticated and think, oh, wow, I want to be like that person.

Exactly.

I want them to be my friend.

Yeah.

And you and I, as people who talk about this on the air all the time, we kind of get versions of this question every week, don’t we?

About why some accents or even some word choices are put down or elevated above the others.

Yeah, good point.

Or different accents in this country.

Today on the show, you’ll hear us talk about prestige accents or received pronunciation, these accents that belong to the educated class, the moneyed class, or the people with power and authority.

And we tend to look up to them and adopt their modes of speech.

And so in the United States for a long time, that accent wasn’t American. That accent was British.

And even today, even though Disney bad guys these days always seem to have a British, you know, like I’m thinking of Scar and the Lion King.

And they seem to have a British accent and the good guy has an American accent.

Even now, that bias still persists.

And yet, and yet, if you go to the UK and you live anywhere on the islands for a few months, long enough, you will soon drop that and think of the accents differently and think of them a little more like a local.

You will drop the idea that all of the people around you are somehow speaking a better form of English or that the accent is a clue to their intelligence.

Oh, interesting. Well, I’m sure Samantha would be thrilled with that advice to go live in England for a while. It sounds like she really likes it.

But, I mean, I know what she means.

I have a friend who has a British accent, and any time she talks, I think she’s smarter than I am.

And it’s sort of like when you say, oh, I could listen to that person read the phone book.

I mean, I could listen to a person with that kind of British accent read the phone book all day.

The larger question is, why do we do this, and what does it take to overcome that kind of bias?

Because the bias almost always is undeserved.

You cannot use the broad brush of an accent or a dialect to paint an individual.

There might be things that are true for the group, but the individual should not be judged by that.

Well, that’s what makes this fun, right?

Just trying to figure all this stuff out.

We’d love to know what you think.

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