Tag: university

Lucy

I’m from County Durham and went to a notoriously posh uni in Leeds, and quickly became used to blank faces looking at me when I spoke, and lots of people, friends and strangers, repeating things I said back to me because they found it amusing. I didn’t mind it at first, but it started getting pretty annoying and making me feel self-conscious. One day, I came across a video of my friends from London that I clearly wasn’t meant to see, of them blatantly mocking me and mimicking my accent (I thought we were all good friends, and I hadn’t done anything to give them a reason to do something like that).

Other experiences include someone asking me “how did you make it to a Russel Group uni?” and hearing people in a lecture start laughing for no other reason than the lecturer played a video where the kid had a strong Yorkshire accent.

I constantly have to change the way I speak so people at uni, even my own housemates, can understand me and it gets tiring. When I go back home my mam says to me “you can stop using your posh voice now”.

Helen

For context I have a slightly mixed accent and can be a bit hard to place. I am from Southport but my whole family is from Liverpool and I have spent much of my life in Manchester. I also took part in a lot of drama and performing arts as a kid. This has meant that I have a Scouse/Lancashire hybrid accent but I also enunciate very clearly. People from Liverpool think I’m from Lancashire, people from Manchester think I’m Scouse, people from the north think I’m a bit posh, people from the south think I’m a northern scally. So I can quite often feel my voice doesn’t really fit anywhere, luckily my sister has a very similar accent to me so at least I’m not alone.

The most clear occasion that I realised my accent may be a barrier for me was in my first year of college. I was studying Classics and Ancient history as one of my AS levels and our teacher decided to take us on a trip down south to Oxford to go to a lecture about Greek pottery. The trip was very enriching and I found the lecture fascinating, so much so that I wanted to ask a question. I waited until the Q&A part of the lecture and spoke in my clearest ringing drama voice, I can’t even remember what I asked now, but I can remember the response. The don scoffed a little, and said “Pardon, what did you say?” I was quite surprised, as I said I can speak extremely clearly when I want to, but duly I repeated the question. This happened again a few more times until we both gave up, and he said something (that I’m sure he thought was very funny) disparaging about scousers and the people in the hall tittered a little.

Up until this point I had considered the idea of attending Oxford but this experience immediately put me off the idea and I instead attended a Russell group university up north.

Llinos

I’m from Powys, Wales. In the valleys of Maldwyn, we have our own dialect of English, largely influenced by Welsh pronunciation. Obviously, the Welsh language is mercilessly mocked everywhere, online and offline, merely for being different; in fact, it was genocided within the last century with the use of the Welsh Not. But, the Welsh dialects of English, if you’re not from, say, Caerfyrddin, is treated horribly. Having to move to England at a young age, I found this out quite quickly.

Speaking with this dialect in school, I was mocked for the way I talked (often told I was “away with the fairies”), the word choices I’d make (which were often more “archaic”), and more. I was constantly bullied and told to “speak proper English”, even though I wasn’t *that* far from Wales. I got punched, I got ostracised, everything, all because I wasn’t…a Midlander? And this has continued well into my adulthood…because I talk with this slight whimsy and have a lot of vocal fry? Because my name is pronounced with a rare sound? It’s not the easiest to understand, but it’s how I was brought up, y’know?

Wanting to get into teaching one day, I eventually killed my accent. It slips out sometimes, especially if I’m taken by surprise, but in large part, it’s been replaced by a Midlands/RP-like accent. Going into academia to try and become a teacher, I’ve noticed marginal differences; I’m often seen as more intelligent, I find it easier to get my points across, and so on.

Ruth

Growing up in Dudley in the 70s and 80s it was made clear to us at school that if we spoke with a Black Country accent that was wrong – punishments were given for using non-standard dialect such as “bae” and “dae” or saying ‘buz’ not ‘bus’. Furthermore, we were also told that if we spoke like our parents we wouldn’t get jobs – this was in the era when the steelworks were closed and the pits were closing. The education authority’s answer was to introduce the “Dudley Choral Speaking and Elocution Competition” – classes from primaries competing in how they learnt and recited various poems (Edward Lear and Kipling were much favoured) and individuals reading inspiring speeches. It was a big annual event: coaches to the town hall, the Express and Star newspaper covering it all, and lots of proud parents. I stopped “dropping my H’s” and forgot my dialect, as did many of my generation.

The “use Standard English” message was reinforced on reaching Uni -apply North, not anywhere South (you wouldn’t fit in). The world seemed full of RP speakers, and we all wanted to fit in. When I started teacher training the ‘SE and RP’ only message was made more explicit: to be a good role model you had to “speak properly”, which certainly didn’t mean revealing any Black Country origins – pupils would never listen to you if you did. After all, it was common knowledge that Brummie and Black Country (usually seen as the same by outsiders) were the most disliked accents in the UK and associated with lack of education. It was years before I questioned whether this was true in practice, and have come to see that children love to “latch onto” the distinctive ways in which their teachers speak and are fascinated by variety. Although I absolutely accept that sometimes differences in accent and dialect can form barrier to communication, I feel that this is rare and I truly wish I had retained more of my language identity.

Bobbie

It first dawned on me that my Midlands accent was particularly prominent when I was in my first year of university. It was approaching dinner (lunch) time, and I said: “Christ, I could eat a scabby ‘oss”. Suddenly, the conversation went dead. My Northern friends genuinely responded like I’d just started speaking in parseltongue. As the years progressed, my pronunciations became a source of entertainment for the people on my undergraduate course. Words such as ‘five’, ‘move’, ‘pikelet’ and ‘mom’ received a lot of complaints especially, with one student telling me to ‘learn the Queen’s English’. My accent also led people to question whether I was intelligent, or whether I was paying somebody to write my essays for me. If I’d received £1 every time somebody said to me “Om from Burrrrmingham”, I imagine I might be very rich by now. Of course, I’m not actually from Birmingham, I live 20 miles away – but nobody ever seemed to want to know that.

Míša (3)

I’ve lived in three countries: the Czech Republic, the UK, and Denmark. I’m a native speaker of Czech and a non-native speaker of some of the languages relevant for the UK and the Danish contexts. I have experienced more negative comments on my attempts to speak Danish than I have on my attempts to speak English or Welsh, irrespective of how far I’ve been on my trajectory to acquire a higher proficiency in the language in question.  The Welsh context has been the most tolerant: most Welsh speakers I’ve encountered have been incredibly supportive of me using Welsh, no matter how many mistakes I produced.

In England, it happened to me once that a non-native speaker of English started correcting my pronunciation in a way I didn’t find appropriate. It was a student attending my class on general phonetics & phonology. “How can I know what dialect I speak?” – “Well, there are various ways to find out. You might start with the literature,” — here I got interrupted. “What?” “You can consult the literature, see what features are typical of the speech of the area where you grew up.” – “What should I consult?” – “The literature.” – “Say it again?” – “The literature?” – “You mean LI-TRI-ture!” Yes, he was focusing on the fact that I pronounced the word “literature” as “lit” – “ra” – “ture” rather than “li” – “tri” – “ture”, which affected how I pronounced the “r”.

I’ve experienced similar reactions more frequently in Denmark when speaking Danish, but on a more extreme level. On three occasions I can remember, Danes refused to continue communicating with me once they realised I’m not a native speaker of Danish. How did this happen? I simply asked them, in Danish: “Could you say that again?” or “Could you say that again a bit more slowly?” Reactions? Head shaking. No words in any language ensued. On one occasion, the speaker didn’t say anything at all, turned away from me and walked away. In another of the three cases, I decided to push the Danish speaker a little bit (everything I said was in Danish): “You can’t say it again?” More vigorous head shaking. “So you can’t say what you’ve just said again, a little bit more slowly?” More head shaking. “Well, have a good Christmas.” He didn’t reply. And I wish I could say I didn’t really care.

I’v also experienced one case of a Danish student correcting my pronunciation of his name, repeatedly for two years (so far). I consulted Danish phoneticians, one of whom had the same name as the student in question. It is indeed the case that I don’t pronounce the name as native speakers would, but it seems that my mispronunciation is not as distant from the native pronunciation as the student has been insisting it is – at least based on the opinions of a couple of native Danish speakers who also happen to be phoneticians focusing on Danish pronunciation in their research. I can understand that one wants one’s name being pronounced correctly, but it’s only happened to me with native Danish speakers that they would make a repeated point about my mispronunciation of a genuine attempt to pronounce their name correctly. I haven’t experienced this with native speakers of Chinese, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Welsh, and possible others.

In Wales, I was once trying to have a friendly conversation with someone on the train. “So what did you think of X?” (We attended the same event, X, the week before we bumped into each other on the train.) The Welsh speaker started correcting my Welsh grammar. I rephrased what I’d just asked with the construction he insisted I should use. After I produced another sentence, he started commenting on my lexicon. This kept on repeating itself, until I gave up trying to have any conversation with him. After the incident, I asked a couple of native speakers of Welsh if the constructions I had originally used were incorrect and why (I had seen them in textbooks.). It turned out that they didn’t find them incorrect. In fact, they found some of the corrections rather bizarre. I couldn’t help wondering if that Welsh speaker would have corrected these constructions if he heard them from native speakers of Welsh.

And as we can see, all the cases I’ve described above have happened with men. I myself am not a man.

Louise

I feel awful when talking to people at times. I am Scottish and love being so. But being from a town very close to the border between Scotland and England, I find my accent is dependent on my situation.

I grew up in a very small town in Scotland close to the border to England. I feel, because of the proximity, my hometown accent is VERY pronounced to make sure people are aware we are Scottish. When I moved to go to University and came back to visit my parents, my dad told me ‘for God’s sake Louise, speak Scottish’ where I thought I was. But I wasn’t speaking in my natural dialect. This is when I realised I adapt my accent to where I am, very easily and unintentionally.

Then I began thinking about when I meet Irish people. I live in the west of Scotland and there are a lot of people in Stranraer, also in the west of Scotland that have almost ‘Belfastian?’ And I take on an Irish accent when speaking to people from Ireland. I’m not being, or trying to be offensive it just changes.

My partner’s grandmother is from Barbados and I have taken in saying ‘it’s a-boat time’ instead of ‘about’ and it’s not out of taking the piss but because I love the pronunciation.

I love doing accents and can do them very well, but also can speak German fluently.

My partner has lived in Lancaster, Scotland and London however and I cannot imitate his accent at all! But when he is speaking very northern ‘lancastarian’ I find myself copying him haha!

Just wanted to hear other people’s stories of accents changing 😊

Kirsty

I grew up in social housing in Yorkshire. I loved learning and I also loved watching The Bill – a series set in a police station focused on solving crime. Going to university to study law therefore seemed like an obvious choice and I was excited to start my course at a Russell Group University.

I turned up fresh faced and enthusiastic – looking forward to my future. I was also feeling nervous and unsure whether University was a place for people like me, especially listening to my peers. It was the first time I really realised that I spoke differently – and that differently was seen by people as a bad thing.

In my first week, I met my tutor in a small group of 6-8 people. My tutor was employed by the University to support us through the course. We all introduced ourselves. My tutor told the group that if we wanted to be successful in law we must learn to speak with a “Westminster accent”. My heart sunk and I could feel my cheeks burning as I realised this must be directed at me and my regional accent… My first week and I had already been told I would not succeed.

This confirmed my suspicion University wasn’t for me and for the first term I had to resist the urge to  drop out of the course. It also really affected my confidence in my studies and socialising with my peers. I then went through a period where I consciously tried to talk “posher”.

One day, something snapped and I asked myself why I was trying so hard to be accepted by people who didn’t respect me. I stopped trying to change who I am and embraced my Yorkshire heritage – it is a huge part of my identity.

The accentism hasn’t stopped and I have so many examples, particularly as I moved to London for work after university, but I now understand there is nothing wrong with me and how I speak. It is society who has a problem and it is something which we need to raise awareness of. The UK’s diversity of regional accents is something to be proud of and celebrate!

Stephen

I was the only student with a Birmingham accent when studying English at the University of Birmingham (yes, Birmingham) way back in the 90s and didn’t I know it! I ended up turning the tables, though, and wrote my dissertation, Masters and PhD on attitudes towards Birmingham English. The last chapter of my PhD thesis (Birmingham English: A Sociolinguistic Study) discusses the effects of language discrimination and argues that this form of prejudice is no less harmful than any other. At the time, Wales (2000) was about the only reference to ‘accentism’ that I could find, so it is heartening to see that the term is now in more widespread use but disheartening to see that so many young people are still suffering from it (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/24/its-had-a-lasting-impact-students-on-being-bullied-over-their-accents).

I still get the odd double take and supercilious comment even today when people hear me speak and see my title. Obviously, for some, Dr + Brummie still do not add up!

Wales, K. 2000. ‘North and South: A Linguistic Divide?’ in English Today 16(01): 4-15.

FF

I moved to a a Scottish  university in the early nineties.  I’m from Lancashire. My course was a mix of students but with a large contingent of Southern English,  middle class  folk. On the first day of seminar – my first utterance was greeted with a smirk and ‘that’s champion!’  by a fellow student from the South.  It was clear that there was a need to patronise the simple northerner.  My intellect was suspect- easily dismissed.

More recently I live in London. My accent has migrated. I still confuse the baristas in coffee shops who can’t understand my order or my name unless I put on my best RP. I tried to help my daughter with her phonics homework but it struck me that some sounds were tricky as my suggestions were greeted with a snort of derision. She argued that ‘what might be right in Lancashire isn’t right here’. She is correct. I’m a phonics failure. My accent fails to hide my roots.  The phonics in the National curriculum taught assumes standard English – RP. This seems hugely discriminatory  for regional dialects/ accents.