To give children the right start, add speaking to the three Rs

I'm not sure when I lost my Yorkshire accent. I had one as a child in the Pennine valley where I lived until I was 18. But now, after migrating southwards, the Yorkshireness is only a kind of underlay. I still say "uz", for example, meaning us, instead of Southern English "uss".

You can hear it most clearly when I do a radio broadcast. Somehow, the microphone reaches down to intonations the un­aided ear may miss. This aural ghost in the machine helps to justify my turning up on Radio 4, from time to time, as a member of the Northern team in Round Britain Quiz.

Would it have mattered if I had carried on speaking broad Yorkshire? Would any schoolboy these days adopt anything like my verbal amalgam?

In "Bad Language", a Penguin paperback out yesterday, two linguists — one Swedish, one English — join forces to argue that it is "undemocratic" for anyone to be discriminated against on the grounds of his or her accent. People should not feel that they have to change. "Accent discrimination", write Peter Trudgill and Lars Andersson, "is an anti-democratic phenomenon, not to­tally unlike racial prejudice and sexual discrimination".

But there is one obvious difference. It is very hard to change your sex or your skin colour (though many people try). Elocu­tion lessons are less hazardous. Listen to the crystalline accents of non-white news announcers. They did not subject their career prospects to the added risk of accent discrimination. In an ideal world, it would be pleasant if you could agree with Trudgill and Andersson: anything goes. But it doesn't, and you can't. If chil­dren are to have the right start to the real world, speaking will have to join reading, writing and arithmetic as a basic skill.

Accent has been somewhat of a taboo in recent years, espe­cially among educationists. It was not nice to talk about it. The taboo was first broken by John Honey in his entertaining sharp-eared survey, "Does Accent Matter?" Honey's answer to his own question was Yes. The Guardian, naturally, poured cold water on the book when it first came out in 1989, but that did it no harm. It has since become, unexpectedly, a bestseller.

Studies show that people rank different accents in a strict social pecking order. Top comes the accent that linguists now call Received Pronunciation (RP) — roughly what used to be called BBC English. Then come "educated Scottish" (meaning, perhaps unfairly, Edinburgh, not Glasgow), with educated Welsh and Irish close behind.

In the middle of the pecking order comes a cluster of accents with a rural undertone: my native Yorkshire, for example, as well as the West Country burr.

City accents fare worst. Despite the Beatles, the Liverpool accent jostles with London/Cockney and the West Midlands ac­cent at the bottom of the linguistic pile.

The city-country divide is especially intriguing in the case of Ireland. Notwithstanding the example of John Cole, the BBC political editor, a Belfast voice — urban and hard-edged — is ranked far below the softer, rural-seeming tones of the Republic. It is no accident that chat show hosts such as Terry Wogan have moved across the Irish Sea from the Republic. The southern Irish voice is somehow seen as being outside the British class struc­ture.

It emerges that people read an extraordinary range of mes­sages into accent. RP-speakers are apparently rated highest, by their hearers, for intelligence, ambition, leadership, self-confidence, wealth and status. As if that weren't enough, they are also credited with good looks, tallness, and even cleanliness.

Not everyone takes this lying down. Glaswegians celebrate the fact that they "belong to Glasgae", and no one can beat a Londoner's local pride. But nobody celebrates the Birmingham accent. The italics are John Honey's. After his book came out, a Midlands television show asked him to defend himself against a university lecturer with a strong Brummie accent. The discus­sion collapsed when the lecturer told Honey he thought his career had, in fact, been blighted by the reaction to the way he spoke. Yet the flat, persistent voices of both Enoch Powell and Brian Walden retain strong traces of their native West Midlands. I suspect that only those who make a career of outsiderishness can successfully cling to it.

I yield to no one in my pride in Yorkshireness. And I am delighted that time has eroded the force of Bernard Shaw's ob­servation that "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate or despite him". I am no defender of snobbism. But, undemocratic or not, the harsh social and linguistic truth remains. If you drop your aitches, you also drop your chances. To be fair to children, teachers and parents cannot ignore this.

PAIRWORK

     Answer the following questions:

1. Read the title of the article. Where are the subject and the predicate of the sentence?
2. Read the subtitle: "To give children the right start, add speak­ing to the three Rs". What is meant by three Rs?
3. Where does Paul Barker come from? What does he do? Where does he work?
4. What sort of accent has he? How does he feel about it?
5. What is "Bad Language"?
6. How do Peter Trundgill and Lars Anderson feel about chang­ing one's accent? What does Paul Barker think about it?
7. What does "elocution" mean?
8. Does Paul Barker think people should take elocution lessons?
9. Have educationists been discussing the problem of teaching speaking for a long time?
10. When did John Honey's survey appear? How did the press receive it? How did the public receive it? Why did opinions differ?
11. What does the ranking order of accents in Britain look like?
12. What characteristics do listeners attribute to RP speakers?
13. How do Glaswegians and Londoners feel about their accents?
14. Who "won" in the television show discussion between John Honey and a university lecturer from Birmingham?
15. Is Bernard Show's remark about accents still valid?
16. Does Paul Barker support or oppose the idea of speakers changing their accents?

Exercise 43

Explain or translate the underlined parts of sentences from the

text.

1. In an ideal world, it would be pleasant if you could agree with Trudgill and Anderson: anything goes.

2. The taboo was first broken by John Honey in his entertain­ing sharp-eared survey. "Does Accent Matter?"

3. City accents fare worst.

4. It emerges that people read an extraordinary range of mes­sages into accent.

5. Not everyone takes this lying down.

6. I am no defender of snobbism.

Exercise 44

In the text find the words corresponding to the following defini­tions.

1. something that sells in very large numbers —
2. strong social custom forbidding a particular word or behav­iour —
3. to gradually wear away or destroy —
4. the art of good clear speaking in public —
5. one's social or professional rank —
6. to travel so as to change one's place of living especially for a limited period —
7. appear from being hidden —
8. a combination or mixture of different things —

Exercise 45

In the text find the English equivalents for the following Russian phrases.

1. невооруженное ухо
2. появиться на радио
3. объединять усилия
4. на основании чего-либо
5. очевидное различие
6. подвергать риску свою будущую карьеру
7. основной навык
8. нарушить запрет
9. несмотря на что-либо
10. городской, сельский акцент
11. наделять кого-либо какими-то качествами
12. цепляться за что-либо
13. уступать кому-либо в чем-либо

Exercise 46

Translate the following sentence into Russian paying special at­tention to the underlined structure.

Accent discrimination is an anti-democratic phenomenon, not totally unlike racial prejudice.

Using the given pattern, form word combinations, making the adjectives below negative and adding NOT to them. Translate them into Russian.

FAVOURABLE, FREQUENT, ATTRACTIVE, NATURAL, RESPONSIVE, MINDFUL, LIKE, COMMON, INTEREST­ING

   Translate the sentences into English using the pattern given above.

1. Новый советник-посланник произвел весьма благопри­ятное впечатление на дипломатический персонал по­сольства.
2. В наши дни собственный персональный компьютер уже стал чем-то вполне обычным и имеется практически в каждом доме.
3. Премьер-министр распорядился о проведении внеоче­редного заседания правительства и, ничуть не забывая о своей ответственности за принятие окончательного ре­шения, призвал собравшихся министров высказаться по существу проблемы.
4. Внезапные бури довольно часто случаются в этих отда­ленных местах.
5. Небезынтересно, что премьер-министр даже не пытался отрицать свою причастность к инциденту.
6. Выбор дипломатической карьеры был вполне естествен­ным для него.
7. Вполне вероятно, что они победят на выборах.
8. На него это очень похоже — сомневаться во всем и не быть уверенным ни в чем.
9. Я нахожу перспективу дипломатической карьеры весьма привлекательной и ваше предложение достаточно заман­чивым.
10. Она хорошо разбирается в нюансах английского языка и неплохо понимает французскую речь.

Exercise 47

Write a summary of Paul Baker's point of view concerning ac­cents.

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