Tongues with a Tang
By MAUREEN O'CONNOR
T HAD the horrible experience of feeling like a 'stranger in my own country not long ago. That same blank look of incomprehension spread over someone's face when I spoke as usually appears when the average Briton is faced with a Spaniard, a Swede or a Somali. I am still not quite sure what I said wrong, but I think that perhaps I confused my listener by pronouncing the `r' in 'park' in some outlandish way.
Yet there I was, in a respectable London suburb, trapped in the peculiarly English jungle of accents, and I had quite clearly said the Wrong Thing. Of course the whole question is subjective. Everything depends on whether you have one or you haven't. If you haven't, you tend to be either derisory or oblivious of the 'whole affair, while if you have, and if you are suffici- ently intrepid to leave your native corner of the land, you at once become an anxious preserver or a harried extinguisher.
An accent inevitably meets the hurtful nuances of English snobbery. People who travel to the far countries and coo over the delightful vowel sounds are more than faintly surprised when the same vowel sounds find their way into their homes, clubs and cocktail parties. A broad vowel is regarded with the same faint disgust reserved for West Indians in the High Street and other people's dogs and children.
Since coming to London from what is generic- ally termed The North (to distinguish it, one suspects, from the more civilised regions) with what I thought was a fairly mild accent I have received one or two shocks. An impeccable South London drawl concluded only the other day that, yes, I had an accent and inquired, in circum- stances in which it was impossible to be blatantly rude, from whence I came. Where had 1 con- ttacted this unfortunate disease? My first re- action was to laugh; my second to exaggerate the long 'u' sounds of which I -retain a definite trace in normal conversation and which become more noticeable when I am excited or angry.
One becomes inured to this kind of rudeness, and in time it develops from an irritation into a source of amusement. Yet to shy and self- conscious people it can be a permanent source of embarrassment which they try to blunt by an affected conformity to more 'standard' sounds or by an equally affected exaggeration of their accent intended to shock London sensibilities. Neither result is pleasant to listen to, but on the other hand it is difficult to resist the erosion of accents in strange surroundings. How many of us adapt imperceptibly to new surroundings, and then on returning home, return also to a more homely mode of speech, acceptable in our native part of the country. Even as a child I adapted my accent to the circumstances, especially when going for my music lesson, in the hope that a 'cultured'
voice might gain approval even if my scales did not. Needless to say, when my scales wandered the accent did not save me.
The whole thing would be no more than another English idiosyncrasy were it not for the vicious uses to which the accent game is so often put. It may no longer be true that a broad accent will keep a good man out of the Civil Service or Sandhurst, but it can hardly be said to be an advantage in some circles, either social or professional. There is some perverted trait in the English character which resents all strange- ness and nonconformity and which, in rejecting regional variations of speech, belies our reputa- tion for tolerance. The possession of an accent invariably lands you at the receiving end of England's appalling snobbishness.
It may be that accents are on the way out anyway, as the original dialects are strangled by the standardised speech of mass communica- tions and teenage idols encourage the new generation to exchange their Bermondsey or Bradford for a mid-Atlantic drawl. One way to overcome the accent snobbery would be to intro- duce Standard English lessons into the schools and iron out every kink and deviation of speech.
Yet the thought of such standardisation makes me shudder. Like Hopkins, my sympathies lie with 'all things counter, original, spare, strange.' Enforced conformity would not only reduce us to an aural wasteland but would eliminate those chance encounters with other exiles, strangers with a trace of somewhere else in their voice, such as the elderly woman I met recently who still retained a hint of pure Lancashire fifty years after moving South. It is almost impossible to visualise an England of Standard speakers, Zomerzet without its burr, Yorkshire no longer laiking; but just playing, cricket (enough to lose them the County Championship for ever), or even Birmingham without Marlene, surely the ugliest of all. And what would happen to the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. those favoured Celts whose accents have earned social accep- tance while others have become inexplicably involved in class warfare?
The only other way to overcome the snobbery attached to accents is to persuade the suburbs, the southern counties and even the universities and professions that it is no more a crime to come from Wakefield or Dudley Port, than it is to be a native of Abersoch or Aberdeen. It is time people started using their ears for listen- ing, not condemning, and they might then realise that one of the pleasures of this country is the wide variety of provincial speech.
It is encouraging to learn that where speech training is being given in State schools it is aim- ing only to correct the lazy and slipshod, and not to eliminate the subtle differences of accent which distinguish a Yorkshireman from a Lan- cashireman, or the people of Devon from those of Cornwall. So for the time being I can rest assured that I can travel North and still be greeted at the station by the familiar accents of home—`Are t'a stopping long, luv?' And in Lon- don? I expect I shall just blunder on, occasionally `pooting' my foot in it, in the hope that one day this stupid embarrassment of strangers will stop, and the British might even learn to accept foreigners too.
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