A research team will be set up next week at the British Academy headquarters overlooking the Mall in London, shedding light on a large-scale project exploring prejudices about North English accents and their speakers. On many levels, the topic of how people speak is fun. But it is also important, the researchers say, because of the “profound” negative social, economic and educational implications for discredited speakers. “This is a prejudice that may dare to say its name,” said Dr. Robert McKenzie, who leads the project at Northumbria University. “We are not allowed to be biased in terms of gender, we are not allowed to be biased in terms of sexual orientation.” But derogatory utterances are still allowed, he said. “You just have to watch an episode of The Simpsons to see how people in the southern United States are portrayed. “It’s strange that I think people still get away with it.” For four years McKenzie and his team have been studying how the English evaluate North and South English accents. They examined explicit and tacit – in other words, unconscious – prejudices. For people with strong northern accents, the conclusions are not good. “People think that speakers in the north of England are less intelligent, less ambitious, less educated and so on, solely because of the way they speak,” McKenzie said. “On the other hand, people in the south are considered to be more ambitious, smarter.” People in the north were also “stereotyped as friendly, extroverted and trustworthy peoples by the salt of the earth.” McKenzie’s study found large differences in self-reported biases and tacit ones. “Negativity towards speaking Northern English or speaking Northern English was much more extreme, much more intense when you looked at the silent level. “This tells us that on a conscious level people are less biased than they once were, but on a tacit level we still have these prejudices.” A century ago, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman despise him.” That may not be true today, but prejudices remain, McKenzie said. “The north of England is becoming less stigmatized, but change is very, very slow. “It’s easy to be really aggressive and tell people not to be prejudiced, but it’s important. We find that children with stigmatized accents are less likely to get high grades in school. People are more likely to be found guilty in court. They are less likely to be offered a job after an interview. They are less likely to be given access to social housing. “These things have an impact on the real world.” Each year the British Academy opens its doors for a summer exhibition of the research project it has funded, described as a “free festival of ideas for strange minds”. The last two years are online. This year McKenzie and his team will be one of 12 participating projects, with guests invited to come and talk about their own experience of accent bias or engaging in interactive activities. This will include listening to the northern and southern English accents and also asking the question about where northern or southern England begins. “That should be interesting,” McKenzie said. “Southerners tend to put the south as a starting point just above London, while my Newcastle students tend to put the south just below Middlesbrough.” He hopes that politicians will come and support his work and campaign to make accents a protected feature under the Equality Act. “Just as people should not have prejudices about gender or prejudice against fat or thin people, so we should not have prejudices against accents,” McKenzie said. McKenzie cited Labor’s Jess Phillips as an example of a politician experiencing eccentricity. Another, less obvious, political victim was Jacob Rees-Mogg. “He was a candidate for parliament in Fife a long time ago, he was obviously being tried,” McKenzie said. “He said he felt he was suffering at the polls because of his accent, that people would not vote for him because they saw him as an outsider. So it works in both ways. “ The summer exhibition of the British Academy will last from 17 to 18 June.
