Prof. Higgins, meet Miss Doolittle

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him,” said Pygmalion’s Higgins.

True, in those days accent was – and to some extent still is – a class indicator. And, though class tensions were never as toxic as Marx portrayed them, neither were they nonexistent.

The Phonetic Atlas of England lists 50 major dialects and perhaps twice as many minor ones. (London alone boasts five distinctive accents, each with sub-variants.) It would be fair to say that even in our progressive times some are perceived as being superior to others, especially since a few accents aren’t always comprehensible to Englishmen from elsewhere.    

Now, 110 years after Shaw wrote his play, such discrimination is about to be outlawed. The Social Mobility Commission has recommended legislation to make socioeconomic background a “protected characteristic” under the Equality Act, alongside race, sex and other forms of discrimination.

Since so far every such proposal has been acted upon, watch out. If you don’t want to get in trouble, make sure you never look down on someone who sounds as if he has just emerged out of a Liverpool or Newcastle slum.

Sorry, did I say ‘look down’? My mistake. You can get in trouble even if you neither do nor even think any such thing. For, according to a recent study, ‘accentism’ is a so-called implicit or unconscious bias. That means you can be an inveterate accentist and not even know it.

It’s not immediately clear how you can get rid of such prejudice if you don’t even realise you have it, but I trust our government officials. They’ll think of something to make our collective schizophrenia progress even faster.

‘Accentism’ is a neologism, adding yet another -ism to the rich collection we have already. I’d love to take credit for this enlargement of our lexicon, but that would be unfair to Dr Robert McKenzie, a social linguist who led the aforementioned study Speaking of Prejudice.

The study found that people with strong northern accents are seen as “less intelligent” and “less educated” than their southern counterparts. The conclusion is obvious: accentism must be outlawed because it causes “profound” social and economic harm to those on the receiving end.

Also, people with “denigrated accents” are more likely to be found guilty in court. No doubt that’s true. But – and I know the skies will open and I’ll be smitten by lightning – could it be that people with “denigrated accents” commit more crimes? I don’t think too many muggers sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Dr McKenzie passionately advocates changes to the Equality Act, citing Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner as one known victim of accentism. He said: “She realises that criticism of her accent is a way of taking away her message, and women in particular are targeted this way.”

In actual, rather than our virtual, reality, Miss Rayner could indeed sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg and still come across as a stupid, ignorant, heavily tattooed guttersnipe. No phonetic exploration is needed to “take away her message”.

Her illiterate, turgid, quasi-communist harangues do a splendid job of it by themselves. Anyway, since Rayner has risen to the second-highest position in one of our two main parties, it’s hard to argue that she has been held back by her accent. If anything, she has grossly overachieved. 

No one thought another politician, Enoch Powell, was “less intelligent” or “less educated” because he spoke with a Wolverhampton accent. Closer to home, one of my closest friends sounds like the Yorkshireman he is. Yet I assure you that even his detractors would never underestimate his erudition and brilliance.

Regional accents began to acquire a bad reputation only in relatively recent times. And back in 1755, when our first dictionary was compiled, even the brightest of men – including Dr Johnson, who compiled our first dictionary – bore the phonetic imprint of their birth.

Things began to change with the rise of the middle classes first to a prominent position, then to a dominant one. People in these social strata tend to be socially insecure, which is why they are often more snobbish than aristocrats.

The dwindling aristocracy ringfenced its accent, but the classes immediately below it began to use a uniform, flat pronunciation (and certain lexical quirks) as a badge of class, sending an instant Mowgli-style message: “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

Also, in those backward Victorian times, England hadn’t yet got around to the idea that every jumped-up trade school could be called a university, for Tony Blair to boast that half the population would soon have higher education. Hence all the upper classes tended to send their offspring to the same few schools and the same two universities.

Those schools provided a better education in humanities than do today’s post-graduate courses at Oxbridge. They were also in competition and, by way of a uniform, each developed its own subtle variance on the public-school accent. That way no one would confuse an Old Etonian with a Harrovian, or either of them with a pupil of Rugby or Marlborough.

Then a new concept appeared, Received Pronunciation or Queen’s English. Victoria, though not her German consort, spoke that way, and the public-school classes imitated her speech, with varying success.

Regional accents became the lot of the uneducated classes, but there was a powerful gravitational pull upwards. Ambitious youngsters wished to join the haute bourgeoisie, and getting rid of their natural accents was an essential social hoist at the time.

Then in barged the twentieth century, heralded by the roar of August guns. Out went the aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall.

The middle classes became truly dominant and they began to put their phonetic foot down. A uniform middle-class pronunciation became de rigueur in many professions, and regional accents could still apply brakes to a career.

Eventually Received Pronunciation began to be associated with BBC announcers. Students from all over the world were learning their English vowels from BBC broadcasts, even as that accent began to deteriorate in its native habitat – first imperceptibly, then noticeably.

As society became more egalitarian, upper-class accents began to shift towards the middle. That vindicates my belief that it’s only possible to equalise down, not up.

Regional accents became more acceptable, if not yet universally so. Yet they too suffered from the pandemic of uniformity. If Prof. Higgins lived closer to our time, he’d find it harder to pinpoint a Londoner’s accent to within a few yards of his home.

All of London, and generally South-Eastern, accents started to smooth out their differences and largely merge into so-called Estuary English, transmogrifying into a generic pan-regional pronunciation.

As England degenerated from an increasingly egalitarian society into a frankly socialist one, regional accents became widely acceptable, even desirable. They were seen as a password opening the door to proletarian virtue. A regional accent was an affirmation of political correctness before the term was even coined.

That tendency didn’t leave the upper classes untouched either. From the Palace down, they started to shift towards the middle as well. Even the language of the Queen left much of Queen’s English behind.

If you compare Her Majesty’s accent at the beginning of her reign and now, you’ll know what I mean. And our lovely future queen, Kate, enunciates words like ‘ball’ as close to ‘bow’, which sounds Estuary to me.

As for the BBC accent, it has disappeared altogether. Being the quintessence and promulgator of a socialist England, the Corporation actively encourages regional accents. These days, most of the Phonetic Atlas is regularly illustrated in news broadcasts.

This brings me to another lament of Dr McKenzie. His heart bleeds gushingly all over the plight of some of our civil servants who have to disguise their regional accents at work.

That may be, but the reverse practice is much more widespread. In advertising, for example, I knew several people who worked hard to shift their accents downwards, to make it easier to get jobs and secure promotions.

The same happens in Miss Rayner’s own field, especially in her own party. Tony Blair, for example, resorts to phonetic subterfuge to disguise his expensive education. He desperately tries to drop his aitches, but sometimes he forgets and reverts to his natural way of speaking.

I have a good explanation for the implicit bias that so vexes Dr McKenzie. Most people with northern accents are perceived as “less intelligent” and “less educated” because they are. So are most people with southern and upper-class accents, along with those whose accents have no obvious geographical origin.

Those pejorative modifiers apply to most people, full stop. They don’t apply to a few bright and erudite individuals here and there – and those people are never underrated because of their vowels.

Never, that is, except in the febrile minds of our social, or rather socialist, warriors who are obsessed with class.