Is having a posh accent a new ick?

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Tlisted below are few experiences extra shudder-inducing than having to hearken to a recording of your personal voice. Something to do with the way in which we hear vibrations by way of our bones after we speak, versus the way in which we hear air-transmitted sounds, apparently. But for Great British Bake Off choose Prue Leith, the precise supply of the cringe is extra particular: her clipped RP tones. “Oh, I hate my voice,” she just lately admitted in an interview with The Times. “It’s too posh. When I replaced Mary Berry on Bake Off someone on Twitter said: ‘Oh no, not that posh b***h,’ and I sort of agreed with her.”

Is it actually attainable to sound “too posh” within the UK? Has talking such as you swallowed a number of again copies of Debrett’s turn out to be a little bit of an ick, to borrow that catch-all time period, and even (at a very massive stretch) a hindrance, more likely to outcome within the type of social media vitriol that Leith references? Our attitudes to accents are difficult – most likely as a result of they mirror our equally jumbled emotions about class.

We definitely understand it’s one thing the really “posh” can get self-conscious about. These days they’re simply as more likely to drop letters as to fastidiously enunciate them.A number of years in the past, a former headmaster of elite public college Harrow (the place charges at the moment are slightly below £17,000 every time period) claimed that his pupils would undertake “Mockney” accents in a bid to sound much less like, effectively, public college boys. And Prince William, the inheritor to the throne, has self-consciously referred to his spouse Kate (that’s the Princess of Wales, Duchess of Cambridge, etcetera etcetera) as his “missus”. To make the entire thing much more counter-intuitive, Kate has reportedly undergone elocution classes to turn out to be posher; in response to royal author Omid Scobie’s ebook Endgame, she now sounds even fancier than her princely husband.

In public-facing industries like leisure, the place Leith has discovered fame, there’s a bizarre double customary round accents, too. Being higher, or at the very least higher center, class is just about the norm, as a result of nobody else can afford to interrupt in. And, aside from on extra formal reveals like information broadcasts, presenters usually have an effect on a extra relatable, much less refined method of talking to attach with their viewers. Think of Dexter, the prosperous, privately-educated protagonist of David Nicholls’ One Day, now an equally heartbreaking Netflix sequence, buying a much-mocked “everyman” voice each time he’s in a tv studio.

Sometimes the method is a little extra gradual:when an outdated Nineties interview clip of the presenter Claudia Winkleman began doing the rounds on Twitter/X final month, it wasn’t her lack of glowing tan and eye-skimming fringe that shocked everybody, however simply how a lot posher she sounded again then in comparison with now. At the identical time, presenters with precise regional accents are apparently informed they sound “too common” for the airwaves, as Steph McGovern (who’s from Middlesbrough) has claimed.

The identical goes for the world of politics: bear in mind Tony Blair’s estuary English? Or when George Osborne briefly acquired a weird “man of the people” accent? What about when Rishi Sunak was mocked for his “geezer” voice on a journey to Essex? Meanwhile the likes of Angela Rayner (from Stockport) are criticised for sounding “thick” for talking with the precise regional accent they grew up with. Make it make sense.

Leith may “hate” talking like a minor royal, however her accent comes with enormous privileges, and it feels foolish to downplay them. In 2022, analysis from the Sutton Trust discovered that accent bias remains to be a main barrier to social mobility, with attitudes in the direction of sure accents remaining just about unchanged because the late Sixties. RP accents are nonetheless the very best ranked by the general public when it comes to “accent prestige”, whereas these linked to “industrial cities” like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, in addition to ethnic minority accents, have been considered the bottom. 29 per cent of senior managers from working class households, in the meantime, stated that they’d been mocked for his or her accent at work.

It’s no marvel that so many individuals really feel the necessity to clean out the way in which they communicate with a view to get forward, as a result of they’ve most likely absorbed years of snidey remarks and hints suggesting that their voice renders their contribution void. I by no means forgot the college interview once I needed to reply questions on a random passage of literature, and the interviewer randomly advised that I would favor “the docks of the Mersey” to the pastoral panorama described within the ebook (I’m from the Wirral – like Leith’s fellow Bake Off choose Paul Hollywood, coincidentally – so I communicate with a very watered-down variant of a Liverpool accent).

If that was their response to a very gentle trace of Scouse, then I hate to assume how they’d have belittled another person with a stronger accent. Saltburn, directed by Emerald Fennell (who has, conversely, been ridiculed on-line for talking like, checks notes, somebody whose 18th birthday pictures have been revealed in Tatler) won’t be a work of the very best realism however let’s simply say I discovered Barry Keoghan’s tutorial scenes even more durable to look at than all of the bizarre necrophilia stuff.

So sorry, Prue, I discover all of the squirming a little bit of a bore. Why not simply personal your poshness, and acknowledge all of the doorways it has most likely opened, quite than moaning about it?