What your accent says about you (and your identity), with Rob Drummond
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I'm Mignon Fogarty. Welcome to the Thursday Show, where we talk with people who are doing interesting things with language. I'm here today with Rob Drummond, who's a sociolinguist at the Manchester Metropolitan University. His book now out in paperback is called You're All Talk.

And he did a large project exploring accents and dialects of Greater Manchester, touring the region in his accent van. Rob Drummond, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you very much. Yeah, so I just finished your book and I loved it. But before we talk, and I want to talk all about it, but first I have to hear more about this accent van. Okay.

Yeah, now this acts of fact, this was, this has proved very popular. People are very interested in this and, and quite rightly, it was, it was great. So what it was basically is that we wanted to do a project around Greater Manchester, which is where I'm based and where, where the university is. And, you know, it's kind of a sociolinguistics project. We wanted to

collect people's voices basically we wanted to interview them record them and we thought a really nice way to do this would be to go out and about and kind of speak to people you know in their own places on their own turf and rather than try and get people into the university we

And so we came up with this idea of the accent band, which is basically a kind of a mobile recording studio. And we drove around the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, which is in the northwest of England. And we invited people on board and people climb on and we're not in there with them. They kind of, they get faced with a camera and a voice recorder and they get asked questions. And the questions are about where they're from and how they speak and what they think about the way they speak and all these kinds of things. And it was just a really nice way of

gathering that kind of recorded data because people felt very, there was a bit of privacy and people felt, clearly felt quite comfortable in sharing some of their stories. So it was great. It was a really, really nice, nice way to do research. Yeah, it sounds very authentic. But how did you get people to come into the van? That sounds a little sketchy. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it does a little bit. And that's quite funny. Yeah, whenever I describe the project, yeah, people kind of raise their eyebrows. And I describe it in a very careful way. But I think people are interested. I think that's the main thing is when you kind of roll up somewhere with this, it was a really nice van as well. And we had it all branded with the accent van and the name of the project was Manchester Voices and University and whatever.

And so it didn't look too threatening. And we were standing outside, you know, kind of looking friendly and inviting people on board. And we had a chat with them first and then they got on. It was great. That sounds great. How many people did you talk with or record? I guess we spoke to about, well, in the van itself, we spoke to about

to about 220 people. And then because this project, it was a big, big project. Um, and, uh, and, and it was, it was a big kind of three-year project had loads of different things. The Axan Bam was just one part of it. And, uh, it was due to start. Well, it did start in May, 2019, um,

And so you can imagine you've got a big public facing community engaged linguistics project. And then at the beginning of 2020, things started getting a little bit different. And so we ended up, we had a virtual version as well. So the accent van had to be put on hold until we could go out safely, which I think was the end of July 2021. So

So in the meantime, we created a virtual accent van as well. So between the two, we got kind of a couple of hundred people through the virtual van and a bit about the same with it. We ended up speaking to about 400 people. Yeah, tough timing. What were your primary findings? Really that the people have a lot of pride in the way they speak. There's a lot of local and regional pride, which we thought there might be. It was really nice to hear that confirmed.

Because certainly within the UK, there are some very strong feelings about the way people speak. And in the north of England, which is where Greater Manchester is, that way of speaking is often seen in quite a negative way. And people who speak with a northern English accent can face a bit of prejudice and even kind of discrimination.

So it was really nice to hear certainly some of the younger people talking about how they feel kind of proud of the way they speak and they're proud of where they're from. And even though they might feel a bit of pressure to change the way they speak, they don't want to and they don't see a need for it. And it was really positive, generally kind of positive, some positive findings from the whole project.

Wonderful. You know, I was talking with Lynn Murphy, another British linguist, last year, and she mentioned that people in Britain are more like in America, in the United States, we get hung up on grammar peeves, like which versus that, like which word are people using? And she told me that in Britain, people tend to focus that energy more on accents rather

And I was wondering why, you know, you study accents. So why do you think that is? Yeah, I think there is a real obsession with accents and the way people speak. And I think a lot of this, as a lot of things in the UK, it boils down to social class and kind of social hierarchies.

and often historic ideas of social class. And, you know, the whole system, the whole concept of class is changing in the UK and it has been changing over the last few decades. It's really hard to sort of pin down what's going on with social class at the moment. But...

People still have very strong ideas that certain ways of speaking are better than others. And certain accents carry this baggage with them of really being looked down on. And yeah, what amazes me, though, in the course of doing my research and then writing this book, was about how young these attitudes come into play. That we're just surrounded by it. We just grow up

with these attitudes that certain ways of speaking are better when linguistically, they're obviously not. There's no objective reason why one accent should be seen as superior to another.

It's purely, purely social. Yeah. In your all talk, you talked about so much about the interplay between class and accent. One of the sort of fascinating studies or anecdotes you mentioned was about migrants who often, you know, when they end up in their new country will be in a lower social class than where they started out and how they feel about their accents. And can you talk a little bit about that work?

That's really interesting. I think it's a really interesting area. And I actually, what made me think about that was years ago, I was doing, it was for my PhD research, I was looking at, I was in Manchester. And I was looking at how certain people, I was looking at Polish migrants, especially, and how so Polish people who'd come to live in Manchester, and they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they

And I was interested to see whether they acquired a Manchester accent in their English or whether, you know, because I noticed at the time, my history as an English language teacher, and I was teaching English as a second language. And I noticed some of my students tended to acquire a Manchester accent in their English and others didn't. And I kind of thought that was interesting. And that became a PhD and I focused on Polish people.

And yeah, I noticed that some did and some didn't. And in the process of doing all this, I got to speak to some really interesting people. And one guy I spoke to, it really struck me. He was working as a security guard in a kind of a factory. So he was doing the night shift, you know, really kind of straightforward, superfluous.

security, whatever. And, you know, important job didn't necessarily require any kind of qualifications for this or anything, anything in particular. And when I got speaking to him, it turned out he used to be a newspaper editor in Poland. But because of the financial situation at the time, this was sort of in the mid 2000s, it made more sense to him financially to come and work in the UK. He

even in this kind of different job. And then thinking about the way people speak, of course, you've got somebody who's surrounded by a very kind of middle-class environment, a very middle-class job, a very middle-class kind of thing, a newspaper editor, and then finds themselves in a different situation in what would be seen, you know, traditionally as kind of a working class kind of job. And I can imagine the people he was working with would be, you know, from a sort of a working class local background.

And that just got me thinking about that. There is this mismatch when people move to a different kind of situation. And maybe those, but there's linguistic stereotypes. I guess it gets all gets mixed up at that point, because if people could understand his Polish, even though I believe Polish doesn't have the same kind of hierarchies as UK English does, but you've sort of got a middle-class language user in a very working class environment.

But all that would be lost because of the language distinction. So I guess it's a refreshing thing in a way. In the same way, it reminds me of when we do explore kind of language attitude studies. When I teach, say, on our master's course, and we have a lot of international students,

And I'll do some really kind of typical studies where we'll, you know, we'll try them out where I'll play some different accents and different voices. And the students have to judge them on how intelligent they sound or how educated or how friendly, kind, all that kind of thing. And the UK students in the class are,

They judge their accents in a very typical way with certain accents, very predictable. These accents come at the top. These accents come at the bottom. But the international students rank them in a completely different way because they don't have that social baggage. They don't have that understanding. They're not brought up surrounded by these biases and prejudices. And so it's really interesting to see, again, purely, purely social.

Yeah, no, I was thinking that as I was reading your book, because I knew there were different accents in Britain. And I know class is a big deal in Britain. But like, if I heard someone visiting the United States, I would just say they have a British accent. But oh, no, no, that's like, that's just the tip of the iceberg. And, you know, you talked about how posh accents are more even, right?

And the sort of lower class accents are more variable. And I was trying to think of a parallel word in the United States. Like, we don't even have the word posh, really. Like, I was trying to think, like, maybe fancy people, we might say, rich people. I don't know. So what is the posh accent and how did it become the one that is supposedly, quote unquote, better? Yeah.

So in England, especially, I mean the UK generally, but especially in England, the most prestigious accent is seen as what's called Received Pronunciation, RP.

sometimes called the Queen's English or now the King's English, sometimes called BBC English. These are all kind of related terms, but it's basically the accent of the sort of privileged, educated, upper class or upper middle class people within England. And the idea is this accent has been studied a lot. And the idea is it's the accent of the elite people.

And the idea is, there's a well-known diagram, I think I put it in the book as well, but it's used in any kind of sociolinguistics textbook, especially in relation to the UK. And it's this kind of triangle where it shows sort of regional variation along the bottom.

and social class along the side. It's trying to show you that the higher up the social scale you go, the less regional variation there is. Another way of putting it is that posh people sound the same wherever you're from. Of course, the way this comes about is that people who inhabit that prestigious, elite, social sphere, they're all going through the same process of

you know, the same kind of schools, the same private schools, the same universities, Oxford and Cambridge, traditionally doing the same kind of courses, going into the same industries, going into whatever it is in business or politics or finance, whatever, you know, the people who hold the power. And so it just becomes this kind of self-fulfilling thing. But what's interesting about RP,

Of course, it's objectively, again, there's nothing objectively better about it. It's not, despite what people say, it's not clearer. It's not easier to understand. It's only because we're so familiar with it being used by people in positions of power. And it's not that it emerged as the most prestigious accent. It was just the accent that people in positions of power were using at particular times in history. So then it becomes entrenched as this

better way of speaking. And we're still dealing with that. And people will still absolutely insist that RP is objectively better and objectively clearer. But it's obviously not because if you think of people speaking in, I don't know, what would be the opposite of RP? Something like

An accent that's very tied to a specific region. In the UK, the Glaswegian Scottish accent, so the accent from Glasgow, is often held up as one that's really quite hard for people from outside Glasgow to understand. But of course, people within Glasgow, they understand each other extremely well. It's nothing objectively difficult.

hard to understand about it. It's just that what we're familiar with in society and in UK society, we're familiar with a kind of an RP type accent. So we see it as better. Is that because of television? It's a lot to do with television because the BBC did traditionally always use the people who spoke with this particular accent. And that was a conscious decision right at the beginning, back in the kind of 1920s and 1930s. And then they sort of moved away from that and they, they,

they actively try and have a variety of voices. Well, they say they do, and they do. But still, if you look at the kind of mainstream news readers, especially on television, they'll all pretty much have the same kind of accent. And the same for politics. Almost all British prime ministers have had the same kind of accent over the years. And because they've literally gone through the same, like I say, it's through the same process. Private schools have

top universities, same courses and into the same sphere where everybody speaks in that way and everybody who speaks in that way does well. And so especially, obviously, if you're a middle-class, middle-aged white man who speaks in a certain way,

then that's the most comfortable situation you can be in. Super. You know, and I have to take a moment. We have listeners in Britain and the UK, and I thank you so much for bearing with us, for, you know, helping maybe less informed American listeners get up to speed on what happens in your country. I really appreciate it. I hope you're still here with us.

We're going to take a quick break for our advertisers. And when we come back, I actually want to go back a second and hear about how the accent studies are conducted, because that's really interesting. And we're going to hear about some of Rob's anecdotes from his own family and their accent experiences. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. We're here with Rob Drummond, author of You're All Talk, a great sociolinguistic book about accents. And, you know, I want to go back for a minute from before the break and talk about the studies because the way the studies are done is so fascinating. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess people do a lot of research into analyzing voices. So I guess as sociolinguists, sociolinguists, we're going to talk about how we can do that.

We, we tend to either be analyzing speech, listening to how people use, use speech in everyday language, not always speech, sometimes, you know, written language as well. But I think a lot of us work with speech.

So we spend a lot of time doing that, which is kind of fairly straightforward in a way. We're just collecting voices from wherever we can. But then another part of sociolinguistics is looking at people's attitudes towards different ways of speaking, attitudes towards different accents. And this is quite interesting to do because...

Like I say, people have very strong feelings about different ways of speaking, but it's quite hard to do because it's very hard to just play people recordings of voices. In theory, you think you could do that. You could just play a recording of one voice and play a recording of another voice and say, which one do you like?

And so I like this one. This sounds more friendly and whatever. But the problem is choosing those voices to use is very difficult because there are so many things you could judge a voice on. So you might think, okay, I'll get a voice from New York and a voice from London. And we'll be able to test whether people prefer a New York accent to a London accent. And so we'll play them these voices. And they'll say, yeah, this one I think sounds friendlier. This one sounds more...

more intelligent or whatever, but you don't really know whether they're assessing the London-ness and the New York-ness. It might be that one voice just has a more pleasing quality. There are loads of things. Certain voices we like, which are nothing to do with the regional accent, they're just nicer voices. Some people like deep voices, some people like softer voices, whatever.

So we need ways of getting around that. And one way we do this actually is what's called a matched guys test, which is quite clever. And what you do is you get, the aim is to play somebody, people, a selection of voices. And you have different voices from different regions, but two of the voices are actually the same person, just different.

kind of putting on a different accent. You need to get somebody who's very good at it, who's very authentic and can authentically use two different dialects, two different accents. So you record them doing one accent, you record them doing another accent, and you mix these recordings up with a whole load of others. So ideally, the people listening don't realise. They don't realise they're listening to the same person. So if you get away with that and they don't realise, then arguably...

The different way people judge those two voices, you kind of ignore the others. But the difference between those two is authentic because everything else is controlled. Everything else is the same. It's literally the same voice. Obviously, going against that, you've got the idea that is it 100% authentic? Well, no, probably not. But saying that, some people are genuinely what we would call bi-dialectal in the same way that people are bilingual and multilingual.

Some people, actually quite a lot of people in certain contexts, genuinely kind of operate in two different accents and dialects for various reasons. So, yeah, it's kind of fascinating how we get around it. Yeah, I want to talk about the people who can do that. You know, you talk a lot in your book about code switching and you talk about how we have at least three different ways

voices, but I think it was friends, family and work. And I have to say, I have like flashbacks to childhood when you were talking about your mom's phone voice. You know, I still remember like being in trouble and then the phone would ring and my mom would pick it up and it'd be her sister and she'd be like, hi, how you doing? Like happy, friendly. And, and I was just like, the whiplash was amazing. So we change our, the way we talk and there's so many different situations and I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah.

Yeah, we do. And I think it's totally normal. I think most people change the way they speak, depending on the situation. What's interesting is often a lot of people say they don't. When you ask people say, oh, no, I never, I never changed the way I speak. If people genuinely don't,

then it's often because they kind of live in a world where they don't have to, where maybe they have a more prestigious way of speaking. They happen to speak in the way that society deems is more prestigious in a certain context.

But most of us change the way we speak. And the phone voice is an obvious example. But I wonder if that's dying out now as young people just don't speak on the phone. You know, that seems to be, you know, that's the thing. I definitely remember my mum doing it. I think I do it.

But certainly my kids, I don't think they ever even speak on the phone. But we, yeah, we do. It's a natural thing. But what's interesting is for some people, it's just a very kind of quite a subtle adjustment in the way we speak. But for other people, it's a real kind of

almost a survival thing. And again, this is where the whole kind of inequality comes in, because so much around language, especially spoken language, has a lot to do with kind of societal inequalities. And this is one really good example where, so for example, my voice, the way I happen to speak, because I happen to have grown up

in the southeast of England, where the kind of... I don't speak in RP, but it's not a million miles away from it. So I know I have a voice that is in the UK, that carries this kind of prestige purely by chance, nothing objectively better about it. But I don't need...

to change the way I speak. I don't need to style shift in any major way. If I do, it's just to fit in with certain things. And the very worst thing that can happen to me is I'll feel a bit awkward because I sound a bit posh in certain situations. But for other people who have an accent that doesn't match society's idea of what is prestigious, there's a real kind of need to do that, not just to fit in, but in order to

to advance in work and in social circles and whatever. And then for some who have a way of speaking that is really stigmatized in particular instances, it can be a really serious thing. And I think the examples I give in the book are to do with kind of young black British men who...

who face issues with the way they speak. They can be judged really harshly for all sorts of things. But there's an example of one young man who was in a situation where he was kind of stopped by the police and he consciously kind of changed the way he spoke just so he didn't fulfill any stereotypes that would cause

escalate the situation. Let's kind of put it that way. And then, so it's all very well people talking about, oh, we style shift, you know, thinking my own style shifting is very kind of slight and it's quite interesting, but for some people it's really, really kind of serious, which is what I think a lot of sociolinguistics is about really is, is trying to challenge, it's trying to shine a light on some of those inequalities and then hopefully,

kind of challenge some of those inequalities too. Yeah, and it does happen in the U.S. When I was in Reno, Nevada, I had a friend who was a recruiter and she was trying to place a man from the South who she said was, you know, highly qualified, very competent, and she could not place him in a job. And she thought it was because of the way that he spoke. And she thought that it wasn't even so much the accent, it's the fact that he spoke so much slower than...

people in Nevada, which is relatively north. And I'm not sure that she ever was able to place him. I'm not sure he ever got a job, which was just stunning. Do you find that with speaking speed too? Is that a part of accent?

Yeah, I think it is. I take a very kind of broad definition of accent. I think most linguists do in a way. You know, I think when we talk about accent, people often immediately think sort of, well, certainly the UK, regional, and I guess in the US as well, you know, there are certain like larger regions. I mean, the US has just as many regional accents as just such a vastly bigger country. The differences are spread over a bigger area. But I would say,

So that's how a lot of people see accent. But I think most linguists, certainly sociolinguists, see accent as incorporating all of those things, you know, voice quality, speed, all, you know, and certain accents...

even certain regional accents are seen as being a bit kind of slower than others. And that can sometimes come across as somebody being really kind of cool and laid back, or it can come across as somebody sounding less intelligent. So there's all sorts of things. And, and there are some great studies too. I mean, there's a great linguist, Kelly Wright in the U S who, who, who's done, who's done some stuff looking at, you know, again, phone people, people on the phone and, and, uh,

missing out on opportunities or facing harsh judgments and discrimination due to how they sound on the phone when looking for, I don't know, rental properties or jobs or whatever. And so that's a really interesting, interesting area. Because what do you do? People do get judged. So that recruiter might be thinking, well, I know this is wrong and this guy shouldn't be judged.

But he is. So then how do we deal with that? And I think, again, as sociolinguists, we kind of have this dual responsibility to kind of give people the tools with which they can kind of navigate an unequal world, but also try to challenge some of those things that are making the world unequal in the first place.

Right. As you pointed out, it's just happenstance that you speak the way you do based on where you were born and where you grew up. And that reminds me of the stories of your kids, which is so, so interesting. Yeah. So I'm from the southeast of England and I live up in the northwest and I have done for like 25 years.

And my accent hasn't changed, I guess, partly because, well, partly because I was an adult when I moved up here, but also because of what I do. I'm very aware of the way I speak and whatever. But yeah, I've got three kids. Well, they've grown up now and they speak obviously in the way that is local. They've all grown up in a very different area than I did. My wife is fairly local to where I am now. So I'm definitely the odd one out. I sound different. But it is interesting how...

It kind of interacts with their personalities as well. And so I think there was a time, which I kind of give this example, there was at one point in their lives when I thought, God, it'd be so interesting if we moved, if we moved to another place, if we moved back to where I'm from.

to see what would happen with the kids' accents. Because I think at the time they were around, I think we were about 14 and 12 and 7, something like that. And I thought this could be really good because if we move to an area where everybody spoke completely differently, like I do, then what would happen? I was thinking the 14-year-old, she would...

I think her accent would sort of stay the same, or would it change? She'd be such an interesting age, 14, you know, 14-year-old teenager. That's such an impressionable age where you kind of want to fit in, but you're finding your own identity. So I don't know what would happen with her. And then the next one down, I kind of thought, well, her accent would probably change pretty quickly, 12.

And then the seven-year-old, I figured he would just change straight away. But anyway, I ran the idea past my wife and thought, let's move and see what happens. But

Apparently that wasn't a good enough reason to move the whole family just to find out what would happen to their accents. So we didn't do it, but it would have been interesting. But yeah, as it is, they've all got very local accents. Although having said that, they get told they sound like, so we're from this place called Bolton in Greater Manchester. And my girls have been told they sound like they have like posh Bolton accents.

And that's partly, again, this because of me, because in the south of the country, it's seen as a posh accent. In the north, it's seen as a not. It just makes no sense. You know, imagine I saying that, you know, part of the US is seen as a fancy accent and part of the US isn't.

On what basis? There are fancy people and not fancy people everywhere. It's crazy. Right. Yeah. And so they picked up a tiny bit of your accents, even though they're out and about in the world? Yeah, I think so. I think they're less, yeah, they're less local than perhaps they would have been if, because we kind of acquire language from all around us. Our biggest, as young kids, our biggest influences are parents and caregivers. But then once we enter school,

our biggest influence are our peers.

But of course, your parents are going to have some kind of influence. If I had a very strong local, you know, local as in where I live now, local accent, where they're from, then I would imagine all of us would sound very similar and they'd have a very strong local accent. So I think I've kind of changed to influence their accent a little bit. Yeah. But your dad, he did move. He went to Wales. And I thought it was so interesting the times that he would choose to change the way he spoke. Let's finish with that. Yeah.

This is my father-in-law, actually. So it's my mum's, my wife's dad. And he moved to Wales and he learned Welsh and became fluent in Welsh and completely fluent bilingual. But at certain times, he lived in an area of Wales where there were quite a lot of tourists as well, quite a lot of English tourists. And the Welsh people don't always like all the English tourists coming over.

And anyway, there are certain situations where it served him very well to pretend to be Welsh. And I think he very much enjoyed being able to be in a shop and speak Welsh just to let the people know, let the shopkeepers know that...

that he's one of them. He's not one of this lot coming in with their fancy cars and, you know, making everything expensive and just getting in the way. And so it's a real identity thing, which is what a lot of the work I do is about. It's linking that idea of spoken language and identity. And the way we speak is a really important way of asserting or performing identity.

different identities in different situations. And that's what he was doing. Great story. Well, the book is You're All Talk, Why We Are What We Speak by Rob Drummond. Rob, where can people find you? I'm still around on X. I'm kind of, I'm over on Blue Sky.

as well actually I'm on I'm on trying all sorts everywhere just look for for Rob Drummond actually there's another guy called Rob Drummond who writes really good plays so either one just find a Rob Drummond you'll either find the the linguist or the playwright and both interesting hopefully

Very generous of you. Well, thank you so much for being here. For the Grammarpalusians, we're going to have a bonus episode. We're going to talk about bilingualism, stammering and accent. That's a really interesting interplay and something called foreign accent syndrome, which is just wild. But for the rest of you, thank you so much for being here. That's all. Thanks for listening.

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