‘I thought mine made me sound stupid’

Before she started university, Beth Beddall had never really thought about her Black Country accent.

But when she started attending seminars during her undergraduate course at Durham University in 2022, she began to feel self conscious, and avoided speaking up in front of the other students.

Beth, from Sandwell in the West Midlands, recalls a privately-educated student once telling her: “You don’t sound like you’re from a private school.”

When she replied telling him she went to a state school, he said: “You must be intimidated by us and how we speak.”

Like Beth, many university students have high levels of accent-based anxiety, according to a 2022 report on accents and social mobility by sociolinguists for the Sutton Trust.

More than a third of over 1,000 university students surveyed said they felt self-conscious about their accent, and 47% said they’d had their accent mocked, criticised or commented on in a social setting.

“In first year, I missed a lot of seminars and workshops because I was so scared to go in and actually have to give an opinion on something because I always felt what I was going to say was going to be wrong,” the 21-year-old says. “A lot of it did come down to the accent.”

She says she felt her fellow students would take her opinions less seriously, and that she was perceived as “stupid”.

According to sociolinguistics expert Dr Amanda Cole, experiences like Beth’s are down to a prejudice called accent bias.

People “draw conclusions about everything” based on someone’s accent, “and they do it really fast,” says Dr Mary Robinson, a research associate in language variation and change at Newcastle University.

Participants in new research by the University of Cambridge and Nottingham Trent University said they thought people with some regional accents were more likely to behave in certain ways.

Of the 10 accents studied, Glaswegians were perceived as most likely to stand up for someone who was being harassed, people with Scouse accents were seen as most likely to commit crimes and people with Standard Southern British English accents were viewed as most likely to report a relative to the police for a minor offence.

In Britain, the biases people have about certain accents largely come down to class, sociolinguists say.

Dr Cole, a lecturer at the University of Essex, says there is a “hierarchy of accents” in the UK, with accents from industrialised urban areas like Glasgow and Birmingham often seen as low status. “Accent prejudice maps onto societal prejudice,” she says.

Sandwell, where Beth is from, was ranked the ninth most income-deprived of the 316 local authorities in England in the latest available data in 2019.

Beth says when she was growing up, her parents were aware of how Black Country accents were perceived and encouraged her to disguise her accent.

Black Country accents are stereotyped as indicating “low intelligence”, says Dr Esther Asprey, a lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton who focuses on West Midlands dialects.

“Urban accents across the UK are associated with a lack of education,” she says. “Which isn’t true – there’s not a causal link.”

This stereotype stems back to the industrial revolution, when people moved to cities for jobs in factories, she says.

Dr Asprey says she has witnessed students being “laughed at” in seminars for the way they speak, and that teachers from the Black Country have told her anecdotes about being asked to get elocution lessons.

Dr Cole says stereotypes often cause people to change their accents.

In fact, the lecturer, who is from east London and grew up in Essex, says she herself has changed the way she talks.

“I’ve modified my accent down a lot,” she says. “I’ve had people call in on radio shows that I’ve been on, saying: ‘If you’re going to have someone talking about language, you should have someone who knows how to speak properly.'”

Accents are formed in early life by family, caretakers and nursery staff, though they might also change based on peer groups when people reach their teens, says Dr Jason Grafmiller, lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Birmingham.

Like Beth, Amy Kean, 42, from Thurrock, Essex, says she never realised she had a strong accent until she went to university.

People would quote Catherine Tate’s schoolgirl character Lauren Cooper’s catchphrase “Am I bovvered?” to her, which Amy says “implies you’re not articulate”.

As a result, Amy says she tried to “mask” her accent while at university to fit in.

Amy says that after she graduated, she was told by a recruitment consultant that she would never be allowed to work with clients because of her “common” accent.

Throughout her career in advertising, her accent would “constantly be referenced”, with people quoting phrases at her from reality show The Only Way Is Essex.

“It’s such a gross way to completely alienate someone when you’re taking the piss out of their voice, which is so personal to you and you use it all the time,” she says. “And it’s so hard to change it.”

Accent bias can also affect the impression candidates make in job interviews and how believable witnesses are seen as in the dock, says Dr Robinson.

Fiona Scott, from Radstock near Bath, says if she could have changed her Somerset accent when she was younger so that she could get her dream job, then she would have.

She says when she was working as a researcher for regional TV news in the mid-90s, she was told by an editor that she couldn’t be an on-screen reporter because her accent was “unsuitable” for TV.

“It never struck me at all that my accent would ever be an issue,” Fiona, now 58 and working in TV production and media consultancy, says. “It definitely hampered the career I hoped I was going to have.”

Dr Robinson says “everyone makes assumptions based on accents”. But when accents are used as a basis for discrimination, she explains this can be a tricky area because they’re not a protected characteristic.

She says that, for example, recruiters in job interviews might use excuses like: “They didn’t sound intelligent.”

“Guessing that someone is a middle class woman based on an accent isn’t inherently bad,” she says. “But if you decide not to hire a woman based on her accent, that’s where it becomes the problem.”

Sociolinguists say there are some signs of improvement, pointing to the wider range of accents now heard on radio and TV news broadcasts.

There are also a number of initiatives set up to raise awareness of accent bias by encouraging people to share their experiences – these include the Accentism Project, Speak For Yerself and Accent Bias Britain.

Dr Grafmiller says research suggests that raising awareness of accent bias can “significantly reduce” the impact of bias in hiring and other contexts. “We may still have a long way to go, but these findings are encouraging,” he says.

“There are gains in the awareness and understanding of the general public but on the whole, accent bias is so deeply entrenched that I believe it will continue to be a problem for a long time,” Dr Robinson says.

Amy is now helping other people who have experienced the same bias she has. She left her job in advertising to set up a company called Good Shout, which provides public speaking and communication training.

Most people who sign up to the training have a regional accent and say they’ve been made to feel “paranoid” about it by comments in the workplace.

“The reason I started it is because I have an Essex accent and I really want other people who don’t have that perfect Queen’s English voice to know that they can still use their voice and they can speak at conferences,” Amy says.