Americans sometimes speak of a British accent, as though Scousers and Geordies talked just the same. Not only is their speech very different, but they might not even be intelligible to each other, as Texans and New Yorkers generally are. People who live in Derry mock the way the inhabitants of Belfast talk, though both probably sound much the same to someone from Knightsbridge.
Despite living with this linguistic diversity, the British are astoundingly bad at identifying accents, not to speak of imitating them. They can usually spot a Scot or a Cockney but are hopelessly at sea when it comes to the subtle distinctions between Manchester and Leeds. Everyone knows that that a series of richly rolled r’s and z sounds indicates the West Country, but not many people know that the natives of Ulster call children “weans” and say “What’s strange?”, meaning “What’s new?” They also have a unique form of intonation which makes it sound as though they’re always complaining, which some years ago during the Troubles they usually were.
If the British accent is a myth, so is a working-class one. There’s no distinctively working-class way of speaking in Britain. It’s rather that working people tend to speak with the accent of their region, whereas the middle classes tend to speak Standard English, which is common to all parts of the country. Even so, the grip of Standard or BBC English is loosening, and along with it ideas of correct or “educated” speech which have been with us at least since the 18th century.
The effect of this is hard to overestimate. Over the centuries, millions of British people have been brought up to believe that their way of talking was improper. Since most of the people around them spoke improperly too, this didn’t matter much of the time; but it meant, for example, that people would think twice before asking them to read out a poem or give a brief speech at a wedding. Language is power, but the great majority of men and women had to make do with a second-class form of power, one contaminated by a verbal virus known as an accent.
This assumes that there are people who speak without an accent, which is as absurd as supposing that one could speak without vocal cords. The fact is that there is no such thing as an accentless form of speech, any more than there is a non-specific way of walking. An accent simply means a particular way of pronouncing a language, and Queen Camilla’s way is quite as particular as Katie Price’s. But there are styles of pronunciation which are socially acceptable and others which are not. The problem is that acceptability is entirely relative. It’s probable that a well-educated late 18th-century gentleman would have pronounced “Duke” as “Dook”, “obliging” as “obleegin”, and “cup of tea” as “coop of tay”. It’s unlikely that he would get to read the TV news if he was around today.
Standard English itself grew out of a regional dialect, roughly the area containing the key centres of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It was part of a strikingly successful attempt by a rising middle class to consolidate its cultural power. Just as they needed a common currency, so they needed a shared way of speaking by which they could recognise each another instantly, without going to the trouble of inventing a secret handshake or wearing a old school tie. “A pat on the back” now sounded like “a pet on the beck”, while “barth”, which was once amusingly rustic, was now polite usage for “bath”. “Really” came to sound like “rarely”, though the two can almost be opposites (as in “I really/rarely enjoy dancing”), and in Sloanish circles “It’s my birthday” became hard to distinguish from “It’s my bathday”, suggesting that you took a bath only once a year.
“The fact is that there is no such thing as an accentless form of speech, any more than there is a non-specific way of walking.”
There are also variations in volume. Generally speaking, people get louder as you travel from Brighton to Lancaster, and there’s a myth in Northern Ireland that Protestants speak louder than Catholics. Some of the public school boys I encountered as a student at Cambridge in the early Sixties seemed to bray rather than speak. This was because only oiks like myself were anxious about other people overhearing their conversation, whereas those with true social authority didn’t give a toss. I was once sitting in a Cambridge hairdresser’s along with a dozen or so other customers when a large young man in cravat, hacking jacket and knee-high boots put his head round the door and bellowed to the barber “Johnnies, Albert!” (“Johnnies” meant condoms in those days.) It’s true that barber’s shops were one of the few places where you could buy such goods in those sexually repressed times, but the transaction was usually hushed and furtive, like buying hard drugs today. There was nothing hushed and furtive about the Right Honourables who swaggered along King’s Parade and hooted in cinemas at the feeblest joke.
It wasn’t long, however, before these young men would be fit meat for the satire of Monty Python. In the post-Beatles era, some ex-public school students at Oxbridge began to roughen up their accents, talk down their noses, and even introduce the odd glottal stop into their speech, as in “ta’oo” for “tattoo”. Old Etonians with orange hair and silver nose rings began to make their appearance among the dreaming spires. Anyone who addressed you with a cheery “Ow yer doin’, mate?” was almost certainly from Harrow or Winchester. Rishi Sunak slurs a little when speaking to ordinary people (you expect him suddenly to whip out a flat cap), just as Harold Wilson’s style of speech became more Yorkshire the further north he travelled. Prince William and Prince Harry speak like regular guys, whereas their father does not.
It’s all a far cry from the encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Alone and tearful in London, Oliver runs into a “snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy” who says “Hullo, my covey, what’s the row” to which Oliver replies “I am very hungry and tired. I have walked a long way, I have been walking these seven days”. It’s hard to know how someone brought up in a workhouse can produce this impeccable piece of Standard English, but there’s a Victorian literary convention which holds that virtuous people tend to speak in this cultivated style. Oliver turns out to be of genteel birth, so perhaps his posh English is genetically determined. You can’t have a hero who drops his aitches, any more than you can have an archbishop who drops his trousers. Moral and linguistic propriety go hand in hand. A gentleman has both good morals and good manners, the latter reflecting the former. As in the novels of Jane Austen, problems arise when someone is socially a gentleman but morally a total bastard.
A good deal of British humour springs from quick changes of linguistic register. Legendary comedians like Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, and Kenneth Williams all trade in abrupt shifts from the tones of the civilised middle classes to a blunter, more popular idiom. A pretentious flight of fantasy is punctured by a sudden crude or mundane comment. Taking poshness down a peg or two is a familiar British pastime, one that reflects the nation’s fondness for self-deprecation, but it’s particularly striking when the refined and the rough-spoken are combined in the same person. What marks the British sensibility isn’t so much pathos as bathos — sudden swoopings from high to low, all of which depend on an acute sense of the way language is bound up with rank and authority.
Speech divides as well as unites: if they haven’t heard you properly, the working class say “ay?”, the lower-middle class say “pardon?”, the middle class say “sorry?” and the upper class say “what?” In their slovenly way, the upper class are also supposed to say huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, which suggests that they’re as indolent in their speech habits as they are in most other things. The effort of pronouncing consonants is simply too exhausting for them, and can be left to their gamekeepers. Military speech, by contrast, is traditionally clipped and precise, as though everything you say takes the form of a command. Its briskness is also meant to dispel emotion, which can get in the way of killing people. It’s hard to tell someone you love them, or ask them to pass the salt, in the tones of the late Lord Montgomery.
Even so, some kind of Standard English will probably survive as long as the so-called public schools do. Most governing classes in history have educated their children apart from the common people, and teaching them a distinctive way of speaking, or even in some cases a different language altogether, has traditionally been part of that privilege. What kind of distinctive speech doesn’t matter: it might well have come about by some historical quirk that the idiom of urban Lancashire became socially dominant, so that the King would speak like Liam Gallagher and call Prince Andrew “our kid”. In that case, one would probably also come across dissident Oxbridge students with silver nose rings who sounded for all the world like David Dimbleby.
