Like many others, I experienced a major shift in my life when I started at secondary school. This has been analysed by sociologists in some depth, but if you’ve been to secondary school or are at one now, you probably know the kind of thing I mean. I don’t want to dwell on that, but for me there were two new shifts, perhaps self-imposed, which actually it would help to give some context to. Let’s start a bit earlier then.
First of all, in the mid-1970s CE, my educational psychologist Dr Gray suggested I learn French. Although I expressed agreement with her, I found the specific choice of that language disappointing because it didn’t seem exotic enough to be interesting and I had already picked up Classical Greek and Latin to some extent owing to my interest in science. French was boring. It was just what all the tourists spoke and what most people on the immediate other side of the English Channel used, and also that language everyone learned at secondary school. It used the same alphabet as English (superficially, but that’s another story) and it was just kind of humdrum. I paid it no heed.
At the same time I was learning cursive handwriting in the Marion Richardson style, which so far as I can tell is the bog standard way of writing in England. I can still do it although I rarely use it, so I can illustrate it easily instead of bothering to find some royalty-free image of it:
Apologies for the low quality, but you get the idea.
I wasn’t able to write this legibly and my teacher told me to go back to printing, so I did. A couple of years later, I was at another primary school and proceeded to learn italic cursive:
This was done with a ballpoint so it doesn’t look exactly like I wrote it. I used to write with extreme pressure, so I would often split fountain pen nibs and sometimes snap pencils in half with the force I applied to the paper. Later on in that school, a rumour went around that that style of cursive was frowned upon at my prospective secondary school and over the summer of 1978, on one day in fact, I scrapped my italic style of handwriting and invented a more rounded version, which is rather similar, as it turns out, to how Round Hand was invented. This has stayed more or less the same ever since, although it’s been through phases and in particular I now use a lot less pressure when I write. When I got to the school in question, it turned out that the teachers were particularly impressed by the clarity and neatness of the style of cursive we’d been taught at that school, and moreover, many of the signs in the school were written in the rather similar Foundation Hand! Hence that was just one of those ridiculous rumours which spread among schoolchildren and there was no real reason for me to change my writing in the first place. This is quite annoying.
I’m talking about writing because in a way your handwriting style is like your voice. There’s the conscious side of what you say and how you say it, and the side which becomes second nature after a while. Analogous processes took place with oral French and English in the transition between primary and secondary school. Before the age of eleven, I spoke with a near-RP accent all the time, but due to anxiety about “fitting in”, I soon adopted the rather Cockney-sounding register my peers at school spoke with. My mother noted at one point that I’d started saying “twenny” instead of “twenty”, which was completely unconscious. A somewhat similar phenomenon happened later with French, where at first, and again it was my mother who picked up on this, my accent was impeccable and close to Parisian but after a while, partly because I felt French had been imposed upon me without any consultation and partly because the “cool” thing to do was not to use the right accent, I just spoke it with what my French teacher once referred to as a “Maidstone accent”, although that was actually a different pupil called, of all things for someone who wouldn’t speak French properly, Marcel Durier. And in fact I wonder now if his first language wasn’t French, or whether he was at least bilingual, and just deliberately pronounced it badly to fit in.
Those are, then, three examples of language use in a child being influenced socially. In each case it was primarily conscious and intentional on the whole. I was unaware of saying, for example, “twenny”, so it wasn’t completely so, but there was a tendency. Each time it was about pressure to conform, though mistakenly so in one case. Things were very different later in my life. By the time I left home and moved to the English East Midlands, I was very conscious of my accent and of the contrast with those of others at university, who were from all over Britain and beyond, and also with the Leicester and Leicestershire accents, which are not the same. I found myself consciously adopting Midland patterns of intonation and altering some of my long vowels and diphthongs, and for some reason making my accent rhotic, to the extent that when I first spoke to Christine Battersby she thought I was American. But I was doing all this deliberately. In fact I’m so intensely conscious of my speech at all times that almost nothing has changed in my basic English since I was eighteen, and I’ve reverted to near-RP. The one exception is that because I was unaware of the division between the way contractions are used between the North and South of England, I now use Northern constructions like “I’ve not” rather than Southern ones such as “I haven’t”. That one got away from me. I do remember at some point a couple of years after I moved to Leicester noticing my use of a rounded short U (as in “bus”) instead of the usual Home Counties “ah” sound (which incidentally I pronounce differently than most Southerners) on the single occasion it occurred, and I “corrected” it. It’s still habitual for me to use glottal stops for intervocalic T’s although I rarely do so.
Most of the time, even though it’s unlike that of those around me, I still speak with a near-RP accent and feel no pressure to do otherwise, although I tend to mumble. This changes, however, when I go to Scotland. I continue to use my usual accent but feel acutely conscious of its drawly and lax quality, and it feels uncomfortable to talk like that. This is probably due to having recent Scottish ancestry. This, also, introduces a complication.
Scots is a separate Ingvaeonic language than English. The other Ingvaeonic languages are sometimes clearly separate, such as Frisian, and sometimes not, as with Bislama and Tok Pisin. Yola I don’t know about so much because it’s extinct, but it seems to have been written rather like English but spoken very differently. Scots is more complicated because it exists on a continuum from Scottish English to Scots the language itself. If I were to speak French nowadays, I would attempt to do so in a somewhat Parisian accent although I also pronounce the final usually silent E’s because I don’t like the dominance of Parisian French and feel it links it more to other Romance languages and Anglo-Norman if I do that. Nonetheless, it feels incumbent upon me to make an effort out of respect for the speakers of another language at least to try to pronounce it well, although it probably isn’t very good. It also just feels lazy not to do so. Interestingly, I’ve been perceived as speaking French with a German accent and German with a French accent, so presumably I should speak Alsatian.
It’s more complicated when it comes to the indigenous Scottish languages. Two or three of them are long dead, namely the Orkney and Shetland Norns and the disappointingly P-Celtic Pictish, which was previously thought to be non-Indo-European and possibly related to Basque. The other three are yet quick: English, Scots and Gàidhlig. I include English here because there is a Scottish variety of English as well as Scots. The two are distinct. Scots, for example, is not spoken in the Highlands, the Western Isles or the Orkneys or Shetlands, but it is spoken in the Northeast and in the Central Belt and various other places. People often seem to find it hard to accept Scots as a valid language, but are fine with Gàidhlig except that this too forms a continuum with other forms of the language, this time geographically. The Scottish government also seems to promote Gàidhlig much more actively than Scots. I have talked about Scots elsewhere (or possibly here as I seem to have had two goes at it). It’s far more widely spoken than Gàidhlig and is therefore not endangered, but the Scots themselves tend to treat it as a bit of a joke.
I would never say /lɒk/ for “loch”, but I don’t say /ɫɔχ/ either. I do, however, say /lɒχ/, and just as using “er” for the French «eu» would be insulting to the French, saying /lɒk/ sounds insulting and ignorant, rather like the American “nucular” or “kie-odo” (for Kyoto). It shows no respect for the ethnicity or culture involved. But as a Sassenach, there’s a problem, as there is with my use of the word “Sassenach” itself: it also comes across as culturally appropriative, like a White person putting on a Caribbean or African American English accent, or what I imagine that might be. I would never do that of course, as it’s like blackface and deeply insulting, but there are also plenty of White Caribbeans with the former accent. A few words here and there do come naturally to me, such as “amn’t”, which is just logical, “aye” and also, as I recently become aware, I wasn’t originally in the habit of calling a small watercourse a “stream” or “beck”, because by a strange happenstance the Kentish dialect words are “nailbourne” and “bourne”, or at least they were when I was growing up. Hence I could easily authentically uncover my habitual tendency to call a burn a “bourne”. Calling it a “nailbourne” would presumably raise eyebrows. It’s also presumably the case that the glottal stops I picked up from my father’s speech also occurred in his own father’s speech, since he was Glaswegian, though whether they were directly transmitted that way is another question.
Considered more generally, using Scots or a Scottish accent a lot of the time would appear to be an affectation for me more than something which is likely to evolve organically without my attention, since I closely scrutinise my speech much of the time. I’m also likely to sound fake even if I tried to do it, and it could also come across as mockery. On the other hand, it seems extremely grating and condescending to refuse to speak Scots, as opposed to Scottish English, without trying to use the phonetics of that language. In general, I do try to pronounce place names as they’re pronounced by the people who live there, so for example there’s a Beaconsfield Road in Leicester which I say with a short E but everyone else says with a long one. Beaconsfield is in Buckinghamshire, where my father’s side of my family lived. It would be weird to call it “Beeconsfield Road”. Why would I do that? On the other hand, it’s been a while since I’ve said “nailbourne” because people in the English Midlands are completely unfamiliar with that word.
For an unknown reason, the vocabulary I’m used to shows divergence from standard British English. I don’t use it at the moment because it sounds American. I don’t know either if it’s inherited from a Scottish origin or something else. I used to refer to meals, in order, as “breakfast”, “dinner” and “tea”, but I think that’s more a class thing than a nationality one. I also called a sofa a “couch” and a living room a “lounge”, and said “mad” when I meant angry. I don’t particularly associate any of these with Scottish English and have never checked. They’re probably all class things actually. Other things have a different history. “Amn’t” happens because “Aren’t I” sounds really ungrammatical and peculiar to me for reasons of consistency. “I’ve not” and the like for “I haven’t” is a rare example of genuine unmonitored drift. I neither know which (whether?) way round that happens in Scotland nor elsewhere in the English-speaking world.
In Scotland, there’s also a difference between the usage of “shall” and “will” and “should” and “ought to”. Among the vowels is the rather perplexing use of an “ah”-type vowel for the short U in the same places as near-RP as opposed to the rounded vowels used in northern England. I find this very strange, but it does mean that certain aspects of my accent are coincidentally more like Scottish accents than the Leicestershire ones. In braid Scots, that vowel has become “I”, as in “mither” as opposed to “mother”. Some of the variations are simply due to the existence of a distinct legal system and government, so for example I am currently in a quandary about whether to call Dumfries a “burgh”. I presume that’s a merely historical detail which has been wiped out by historical changes and everyone calls it something beginning with a T and ending in an N. Getting back to accent, although my impression is that this is almost absent everywhere nowadays, I once distinguished between “w” and “wh” in speech and somewhere deeply buried it’s still natural for me to do this. Recently this led to me calling it “Whitby” rather than “Witby”, which probably a lot of people thought was strange and an affectation, but I can assure you it’s genuinely part of my original accent. They seem to be lost, but for a short period from 26th July 1980 to around April 1982, I kept a spoken diary on cassette which preserves something like my original accent. The big difference is that it’s very clearly enunciated.
It seems that there are two different approaches to accents used by actors. One is the straightforward phonetic technique of simply transposing one’s own phonemes into those used by speakers with that accent, but apparently this is only rarely used, unnecessarily laborious and prone to slippage. The other is to hold the speech organs in a particular set of positions whence the accent emerges as a matter of course. Liverpudlian can be taken as an illustration. If an actor is from London, they can reproduce such an accent by relaxing the soft palate and bringing the back of the tongue closer to it. Likewise, the vowel shift present in New Zealand and Australian accents is generally in the same direction for each vowel, suggesting that holding the tongue in a consistent position compared to a near-RP accent would enable someone with such an accent to sound more Ozzie or Kiwi, and conversely for someone from Australasia to sound like they’re from London. This approach doesn’t work perfectly of course. For instance, the voicing of intervocalic T in Australian English is not likely to result from this.
This brings me to the remarkable phenomenon of Foreign Accent Syndrome. This is a neuropsychological condition where someone ends up sounding like their accent has changed. What isn’t clear to me here is whether the accent also sounds that way to someone with the purported accent or it just sounds like that to people without it. This can occur as a result of a stroke, a migraine, epilepsy medication or on one occasion a tonsillectomy. I’m going to describe it first naïvely with an imaginary case history. A woman speaks with a Cockney accent, has a stroke and recovers fine, but is then perceived as speaking with a Scottish accent. My naïve understanding of this situation is that the stroke affected the part of her motor cortex, changing how she uses her speech organs in a way which makes her sound Scottish to her Londoner friends. For instance, the way she holds her tongue may be tenser than before and it may not move as much when she attempts to pronounce diphthongs. It’s similar to how a stroke might affect someone’s gait, and presumably handwriting, except that different muscles are involved.
However, this may not be what’s happening. I’ve now carefully listened to two Australians who appear to have acquired an Irish accent, and in both cases the long O began with /o:/ and didn’t seem to be a monophthong, but their accent also became rhotic, which is very hard to explain in this way. Rhotic accents do sometimes have hypercorrection where, for example, an R might be inserted after the A in “china”, but in general this is taken to be a sign of a fake accent and these Australians’ accent went from being non-rhotic to properly rhotic without hypercorrection. For instance, they would pronounce the R in “first” and “mother” but not an R at the end of “dahlia” at the end of a sentence. This is highly perplexing.
People with foreign accent syndrome face many challenges. One is that accent can be an important part of self-identity. Another is that they can be seen as mocking someone with that accent, as might occur if a White English person whose accent has acquired a Caribbean sound to other people of their ethnicity converses with a Black person of Caribbean heritage whose accent has always been like that. Thirdly, it can be seen as fake and an affectation, or as attention-seeking. These particular objections remind me of the prejudice which used to exist against left-handedness, which tended to be given psychoanalytical explanations such as the person in question being anti-conformist or defiant in some way. Finally, it might expose them to prejudice and active racism. The fact that, presumably, any person able to speak fluently could come down with foreign accent syndrome might give actively racist people pause for thought.
Brain scans do in fact show that there are differences in brain activity for people with this issue, and I’m now going to dive into a less naïve approach. The syndrome is rarely diagnosed, averaging cases in single figures per decade, and appears to be connected to the function of the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for, among many other things, coördination, timing and smoothness of movement, so it seems clear that this is a factor, although it still seems odd that someone’s accent could become rhotic as a result of this, so I don’t feel this is the whole answer. Two-thirds of diagnoses of foreign accent syndrome are made for females. Less surprisingly, they are made in adults. There is often recovery and musical approaches can be successful. The speaker themselves does perceive the accent as foreign.
This phenomenon sounds to me as if it involves the same kind of foreign accent production as an actor placing their speech organs in a particular state such as tension or relaxation. Hence maybe when an accent rubs off on someone, it occurs in a similar manner, perhaps in the way someone’s posture might come to mirror someone else’s.
This raises a second issue. Effectively, both writing and speech, and also signing, involve the use of a very specific set of finely controlled muscles. Other muscles are involved in other social and other aspects of life, such as dancing, Yoga asanas, sporting activities and generally how people hold themselves. Again there are contrasting approaches to this, one involving conscious training that becomes unconscious, the other involving a kind of suggestion, namely the Alexander Technique. The approach to adopting an accent that involves training on individual phonemes seems less like Alexander Technique than the “acting” approach, where a general Gestalt is adopted. If one small set of movements changes, it can affect the way practically every movement is made. Perhaps the same applies to language and handwriting, on smaller and larger scales. Maybe if my handwriting changes, it reflects other, deeper changes in myself, and likewise if I change the way I speak, I also move differently in other ways. This could also work the other way: grosser changes in movement lead to changes in voice and writing. This is where it impinges on the vexed question of graphology, widely regarded as a pseudoscience. Surely it would be odd for someone’s handwriting not to reflect their personality? Does this also mean that people speaking different languages might also move differently?
Moreover, we do not generally criticise people for attempting to improve their posture or perhaps surrendering themselves to suggestion in this area, so why would we criticise someone as such for attempting to change their accent. Granted, there are issues such as why someone would adopt “Mockney” or pretend to be posher than they are, and there’s the question of appropriation, but what’s the issue about faking it until you make it in that particular area? Maybe there is one, and I mean that. It could really be that I’m missing something here, and I’d be very interested in hearing your views on this.
A Box Of Chocolates 