Regionalism - stereotype and bias

I stood next to a party of people on the tube this week who clearly weren’t ‘some of us’. There was a range of accents, mostly northern. None of them were Londoners or from the home counties.

The minute you hear a regional British accent, you automatically think of the stereotypes. Sadly, so many of them seem to be true.

There was a Liverpudlian in this group this morning who really did say ‘Alright’ every thirty seconds and who, somewhat unwisely in the middle of Kensington and Chelsea only a mile or two from Stamford Bridge loudly pronounced in the middle of a conversation about footie that Chelsea really were ‘shite’ weren’t they?

There’s no reason why people from the north, west or centre of England shouldn’t be as cultured and nice as those of us in the south (or indeed those from Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales) but our prejudiced southern ears so often hear sounds that aren’t old fashioned BBC English and dismiss the speaker as either

a)   Common

b)   Illiterate

c)   Stupid or

d)   Poor

Why do we do that? Is it just generations of bias handed down from parents to children, or do we have personal experiences of people from these places who meet the criteria above and so we assume that everyone must be like that? Have we been unduly influenced by comedy programmes such as ‘Harry Enfield and Chums’ or by articles in the press about the deprivation and social difficulties in other regions which we assume infects all those that reside there?

I have family up north (in Accrington, to be precise) and I can honestly say that they don’t fulfil any of those criteria above, but I still leap to the stereotype when I hear the accent even though I know it isn’t typical but is, as with any stereotype, an extreme. We have stereotypes in London – until I worked in Kensington I didn’t think the tweed wearing blue rinsed Kensington lady who lunched really existed, but boy, oh boy, she does. I didn’t really believe that the stereotypical young Asian lad who goes around in leisure clothes all the time, wears his baseball cap backwards and says ‘innit’ all the time existed, but he does.

Stereotyping is a bad thing, celebrating regionalism isn’t. Variety is the spice of life, and it would be very boring if we were all Barbour wearing, BBC English speaking southerners, wouldn’t it? But equally, I really dislike it when organisations such as the BBC shove regionalism in our faces and put people with such strong accents on the news that I can’t understand a word. Equally, it pisses me off when I talk to some call centre or other based in Glasgow and get someone with a Scots accent so thick I cannot understand a word, made worse by the fact that they speak at nineteen to the dozen.

I have friends that come from all over the UK. Most of them I can understand perfectly well but that may be because they have lived in the south for quite a while, and none of them seem to have any funny regional habits (well, not that I know of, although some of them do eat some very odd things). I am happy for them to celebrate their origins and be proud of them.

But I do think you have to be realistic. If you’re a broadcaster, you need to make sure that all of your audience can understand what you are broadcasting. I’m not advocating they should broadcast routinely in other languages (this is the UK for goodness sake, so if you live here you should learn to speak English) but simply that you need to broadcast in a dialect that is clear and unambiguous.

James McNaughtie on the today programme with his soft but clear Scots accent I can cope with, a broadly spoken but token Glaswegian or Geordie I can’t.