Speaking in Tongues
‘…no one understands, but in his spirit, he speaks mysteries’ 1 Corinthians 14:2.
We moved to Southeast London when I was three years old, and it wasn’t long before I picked up the local dialect. I began to say ‘ain’t’ instead of ‘isn’t’/ ‘hasn’t’, with the final ‘t’ barely pronounced, just a faint guttural sound petering out, coming from the back of the throat. I dropped my aitches and a bunch of other letters that suddenly became redundant. I substituted various sounds in the middle of words too, or sometimes just cut the sounds out completely, but it was the ‘ain’t’ in particular that enraged my father. It was partly the word itself, because he considered it ‘not a real word’ and he thought I was using it deliberately, to rile him. But also, that glottal stop, the ‘ng’ sound instead of the crisp ‘t’ at the end, that makes the word hang in the air, as if unfinished, made him think I was being lazy. But most of all, he thought the accent ‘common’.
Giles (1970)[1] found that the ‘standard English’ accent was rated highest by respondents for prestige and pleasantness, while non-standard urban vernaculars (Liverpool, Cockney, Birmingham) were rated lowest. Some fifty years later, the Accent Bias in Britain Project (2020)[2] demonstrated that little had changed. There remained a ‘persistent hierarchy of accent evaluations, one that penalises non-standard working-class and ethnic accents and upholds the belief that national standard varieties are the most prestigious.’
By the time I began secondary school we had moved again, and my grades suffered, which my father put down to lack of effort. He would linger over my report book, handwritten in those days, and read extra meanings into the teachers’ already negative comments. I can still remember some of those comments now, because I had to stand in front of my father listening to him repeating them over and over again before he asked, for example, ‘What does “Alice has missed a lot of classes this term” signify?’ I soon learned that whatever answer I gave was not going to be right, even if I ensured that ‘ain’t’ didn’t come into it. I’m not sure if it was the weeks of punishment through silence or the anticipation of a punch or slap, but the end of the school year was always bittersweet. There was that yearning for the holidays, juxtaposed with the knowledge that one of those punitive options was coming too.
Research has found that students rate teachers more favourably and recall more information from their lessons when the teacher has the same accent as them.[3]
By this time, we’d moved to Surrey, and I’d begun to soften the edges of my accent and temper my dialect. The ‘t’s were sounded at the end of words, most of the time, and ‘ain’t’ had gradually been eliminated. As I said, my father always made it clear that the accent sounded ‘common’, but I hadn’t realised before that first day in my new school, the other implications it carried. And so, within a week, I found myself hoicked out of the mainstream English class and placed in the remedial set. It was evident that the way I spoke was not consistent with being gifted in English. My grades plummeted as soon as I joined that school. I wasn’t altogether sure why, but somehow, I’d lost all enthusiasm for learning.
In a 2009 podcast, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned about the dangers of the ‘single story.’ She argued that when a people are shown as one thing, as only one thing over and over again, then that is what they become. Stereotypes, she said, make one story become the only story.[4]
When I started out at that school, every time I opened my mouth and spoke in class, there would be a long pause during which a sea of faces would turn towards me. Eyes would widen, mouths fall open, and some foreheads wrinkled in confusion. There would often be a sniggering in the background too. People couldn’t understand me. My accent, my dialect, let me down. It betrayed me. It would not let me be heard. So, I fell silent. (Alice was passive that year.) The French teacher wouldn’t have it though. He forced me to speak. A tall, orange haired man, bald on top with huge sideburns to compensate, and moist bulbous lips, he insisted on picking me out to read complicated sentences aloud, in front of the whole class. My Cockney accent did not lend itself to the soft nasal intonations of the French accent leading him to exclaim more than once, ‘Well Alice, you have just proved that this lesson has been absolutely pointless.’ And so I became stupid, flat, unidimensional. My dialect came to define me.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.[5]
When my father read any of the fiction I wrote, he would always finish with a sardonic smirk. He encouraged me to write but also discouraged me. Push – pull. He commented that my stories always involved violence, and often ended in the death of the protagonist. I wonder why that was?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word ‘Cockney’ was first noted in 1362, when it meant ‘cock’s egg’, which was a medieval term for a misshapen egg, i.e. an egg that is defective. The OED also points to its usage by Chaucer to refer to a ‘milksop’ (a person who is indecisive and lacking in courage) suggesting that city dwellers are weaklings in contrast to the tougher country folk.[6]
I remember that when I wanted to stay on in the sixth form at school, the careers tutor tried to persuade me to leave. When I insisted on remaining, she said that I would only be able to take two ‘A’ Levels, rather than the usual three, which she considered would be too much for me. I persisted with education though and eventually got to the stage of professional training. When I began my MSc, I remember a particular day in class when I asked a question, or made a point, and the lecturer repeated back to me what I had just said, mimicking my accent. She then laughed heartily. I’m ashamed to say that I just smiled.
A 2021 study revealed that the accent a comedian has might play a part in their success. It was found that 51% of people polled thought that the London Cockney accent added to the comic delivery.[7]
I was humiliated but I let her get away with it.
‘The problem of the single story is this – it robs people of their dignity.’[8]
Accent or dialect has had a pervasive influence on my relationship with my father, as well as peers at school, teachers, and some friends. It has also infiltrated my romantic relationships on occasion. My first partner was from East London, whereas I had spent a large part of my childhood in Southeast London. He was from the North of river, I from the South. We weren’t actually too far apart, as the crow flies, but the Thames in between us was akin to a vast ocean. He saw southerners as ‘not true Londoners’ and certainly ‘not true Cockneys’, (notwithstanding that he actually lived in Essex, and not the East End at all.) One of the reasons that our relationship didn’t work out was, I have often thought, because he was secretly ashamed to be with a South Londoner. I was the wrong kind of Cockney. What does it mean to be a Cockney, though? Tradition has it that a person can only claim such a title if born in the East End, more specifically, within earshot of the ‘Bow Bells’; the chimes from the bells of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. Well, I wasn’t born in London, and didn’t live within the sound of the bells either. So, maybe I was the wrong kind of Cockney after all, or not even a Cockney at all in fact. But if anyone had listened to my accent as a child, I defy them to distinguish between it and that of a Londoner from just across the water.
A survey in 2012 looked at how far the ringing of Bow Bells would have carried 150 years earlier. It was found that they could be heard six miles to the east, four to the west, five to the north and three to the south. This encompasses territory to the south of the river as far as Bermondsey, but not stretching to the far southeast.[9]
Early in my career, when I moved to Wales, my first attempt to order a pint in a local pub was met with a frown and shoulder shrug. Repeating the request did not assist and the barman turned away, with a sneer. I had to rely on a friend to order on my behalf. The accent I thought I’d jettisoned seemed to have become amplified in the South Wales valleys when juxtaposed with that dialect which is often described as ‘melodic ‘and ‘lilting.’ I was instantly recognisable to all as a Londoner. I found that some people I met from the local area became angry when they heard me talk, accusing me of being an English interloper who had stolen both a job and a home from the local population. This was despite the fact that I was in a profession where demand outstripped supply at the time.
It has been found that listeners who have difficulty understanding a speaker are more likely to experience negative emotions[10] and adults tend to perceive individuals who share a linguistic background as being more socially desirable and intelligent than those who speak with a different accent.[11]
In England I have often been asked where my accent is from and, when asked to guess, Australia has been suggested more than once, as has the West Country (strangers have actually asked me if I am the comic poet Pam Ayres.) Others have said that I speak as if my teeth are wired together. Maybe that is a legacy of worrying about being heard, of what my escaping voice might mean to people, or might mean to me, so I have tried to suppress it? The way I have stifled my way of talking has squashed my voice into strange crevices and landscapes. It shifts and pulsates in ways that are perceived as unusual, and sometimes incomprehensible. I’ve become an outsider in my own country. My accent no longer fits anywhere. I have spent a lot of my life being confused about my in-group/out-group status. My Londoner origins should mean that I am part of that group of people, but it isn’t so straightforward. There are different accents in different parts of the city, and these may collide rather than merge in a smooth confluence. Accent is a strange thing. It is slippery. There are important nuances that are difficult to define. It refuses to be grasped, sliding through the fingers like a handful of sand.
‘The moment an Englishman opens his mouth, another Englishman despises him’[12]
I have recently found myself considering how language and culture might relate to accent and dialect. To me it seems that these things are intertwined, connecting in complicated ways that seem to elude me. Can a person’s accent, their dialect, also have a profound impact on how they are perceived by both themselves and others? When I began to take on the accent and dialect of Surrey, did I also take on a new persona, or a dual persona? Was it actually all my fault, these misunderstandings and wrong footings? Perhaps it was the case that I switched personality, depending upon which dialect I was using, or who I was with, which culture I was emersed in. May this also, in turn, have influenced how others perceived me and how they treated me?
Research has found that bilingual (Spanish/English) bicultural participants’ perceptions of a woman in an advertisement varied depending on the language used in that same advert. When Spanish, the woman was seen as a risk-taking independent woman, whereas when English, the woman was seen as hopeless, lonely and confused. Again, the bicultural aspect was critical here.[13]
Even when making efforts to force my voice to conform to the Surrey accent of the environment I found myself in, it resisted such moulding. My Cockney-ness continued to break through. It has since occurred to me that having this accent, that was so different to that of my parents, could have placed me in the out-group in relation to my own family. Would my father have perceived me more favourably had I shared his accent or dialect? Would he have been kinder? More loving? Less mean? Does the violence in my childhood really come down to geography? My brother, who was often the one who was targeted most severely, had the strongest Cockney accent of all four siblings. The one who got away with most, my youngest brother, didn’t learn to speak until we moved to Surrey, so he escaped the dialect/accent issue entirely. If my father had not been offered that job in London, might it all never have happened?
In line with social identity theory, individuals typically judge their own accent or the accent most similar to their own as belonging to someone who is more favourable and trustworthy.[14]
Whenever my father was in one of his rages, I would go quiet. Perhaps I had some subconscious understanding that expressing myself in a Cockney accent would make things worse? My sister would shout back at him, verbally intervening when he had our brother by the throat or was throwing him across the room. That brought her into the midst of the fray. I was present, but not present. My sister’s voice gave her away. It lured him to her. Even when our youngest brother said something during these scenes, he was never the one to get a slap or punch and was never ignored.
Speech patterns function as an effective way of identifying perceived outsiders.[15] It has been suggested that accents have evolved to drive the growth of non-kin cooperation in human groups.[16]
Is this something my father could have controlled? Was accent or dialect really so relevant in our family, or have I oversimplified? And anyway, how much is this bias a matter of choice and how much of it is wired into the heart of us, biologically? Has my father’s apparent mellowing towards me over the years occurred because he’s become softer at the edges through age, or has the flattening of the curves and bounces in my speech, making it more similar to his own, triggered something within him, a recognition perhaps? An emerging warmth over which he also has no power?
Research has found that cerebral activity in areas associated with emotional processes, showed significant interaction between the participants’ own accent and the accent they listened to. The activation in the basal amygdalae was elevated when listening to a person with a similar accent. This suggested greater emotional sensitivity toward in-group accents.[17]
The issue of domestic abuse was never discussed with my parents. Even with the distance of time, the subject has not been broached. It is as if this was never a matter of concern for us, like the violence never happened or never touched our lives. My father said to me recently, out of the blue, ‘I know I used to overreact.’ This was not expanded upon, and I did not make any comment or ask for further explanation. Maybe because I was always quiet during his rages, he chose to say this to me alone, and not to any of my siblings; he guessed I would not react. Our past arguments about accent and dialect are also never spoken of, possibly because the traces of Cockney lie only at the edges of me now, for the most part remaining mute. Only at times of high emotion might echoes slip out.
[1] Giles, H. (1970) Evaluative Reactions to Accents. Educational Review, 22:3, 211-227.
[2] Levon, E., Sharma, D., Watt, D. & Perry, C. (2020) Accent Bias is Britain: Attitudes to accents in Britain and Implications for fair access. London: Queen Mary University of London.
[3] Gill, M.M. (1994) Accent and Stereotypes: Their effects on perceptions of teachers and lecture comprehension. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 22:348-361.
[4] Adichie, C. N. (2009) The Danger of the Single Story. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
[5] Adichie, C. N. (2009) Op Cit.
[6] Cockney. https://public.oed.com/blog/cockney/ Published August 17/2012.
[7] Dessau, B. (2021) Putting the accent on Humour. Https://www.beyondthejoke.co.uk/content/10527/putting-accent-humour
[8] Adichie, C. N. (2009) Op Cit.
[9] 24 Acoustics. (2012) http://www.24acoustics.co.uk/bow-bells-london-cockney/
[10] Bresnahan, M.I & Kim, M.S. (1993) Factors of Receptivity and Resistance toward International Teaching Assistants. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 4: 1-12.
[11] Gluszek, A. & Dovidio, J.F. (2010). The Way they Speak: A social psychological perspective on the stigma of nonnative accents in communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 214-237.
[12] Shaw, G.B. (2003) Pygmalion. London: Penguin Classics.
[13] Luna et al (2008) Op cit.
[14] Coupland, N. & Bishop, H. (2007) Ideologised Values for British Accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11: 74-93.
[15] Derwing, T.M. & Munro, M.J. (2009) Putting Accent in its Place: Rethinking obstacles to communication. Language Teaching, 42(4), 476-490.
[16] Cohen, E. (2012) The Evolution of Tag-Based Cooperation in Humans: The Case for Accent. Current Anthropology, 53: 586-616.
[17] Bestelmeyer, P., Belin, P. & Ladd, D. (2015) A Neural Marker for Social Bias Toward In-group Accents. Cerebral Cortex, 25: 3953-3961.