What can tha do when thi boots let watter: Towards accentism in the UK
She looks at me, eyes narrowed, her question still hanging in the air between us. I turn away slightly, smiling and waving as my dad finally drives off in his Vauxhall Cavalier. A dark cloud sags apologetically in the sky. My cheeks burn as the sting of her stare lands keenly upon my face. My friend has asked presumably what she thinks is an innocuous question, but it has winded me. In a sea of ‘where are you from?’ this ‘what language is he speaking?’ feels like an extra spiky barb to a twelve-year-old who wants nothing more from life than to belong.
ENGLISH YOU IDIOT! I should have shouted. I feel sorry for you that your world is so small, I should have said, that you’ll never know the joy and the terror of the Caribbean characters conjured at night. That your ears will never attune to the richness of the sounds or the subtleties of the regions. Our accents tell a story, I should have explained, of who we are and where we’re from. But they needn’t define us, I should’ve added. And we should never be ashamed of them.
Instead, I shrink.
“English.” I reply, my intonation at the end a question. The word quivers with uncertainty, a representation of the ambiguity the term brings. It is an old foe, and one I’ll continue to wrestle with in the years to come as I torture myself in the name of identity. I am fractured, and well-meaning questions do nothing to aid my kintsugi.
She doesn’t say it, but I know what she is thinking, just as I see it in the eyes of shop assistants and teachers and doctors and bus drivers. It’s there on the frowns and the scowls and the raised eyebrows. It hides in the laughter and the smirks and the knowing glances.
Five years from this moment, I’ll investigate my dad’s language use, pour his timbre into cassette tapes to study his convergence and divergence at A-Level. Ten years from this moment, a part of me will die with him, as the magic he conjures with his voice ebbs to occupy just the shadows in my memories. I’ll cease to hear those earthy Caribbean tones or his singsong bass filling the walls of our house. I’ll yearn to hear him yelling my name; even in anger, his voice melodic. I’ll ache for his accent.
But here, in this moment, I wonder if he’ll ever change the way he speaks.
Twenty years, I think, is a long time to be in a place and anchor yourself to another with your voice. I wonder if he’ll flatten his vowels and lose the sunshine. I wonder if he’ll conform to some unspoken norm that prizes Received Pronunciation over all else.
I wonder if he’ll belong.
The conversation moves on, but the seed has already been planted. And though, over twenty years later, the world has also moved on, or at least, time has passed in the way it does, the stigma towards accents pervades.
I should know.
This accent I so desperately wanted my dad to have now belongs to me. And in the spaces I occupy, I recognise those frowns and scowls and raised eyebrows.
Yorkshire is the largest county in the UK. We defeated the Vikings at Stamford Bridge in 1066. We’ve the oldest city in Britain. We’ve two UNESCO World Heritage sites. Our stunning vistas include the Yorkshire Dales, the North Yorkshire Moors and the Peak District National Parks. If we were a country, we’d have come twelfth in the 2012 Olympics. Our exports include cheese and ale, steel, rhubarb and Yorkshire puddings, Hendo’s relish, the Arctic Monkeys, David Hockney and the Brontë sisters and Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench. We’re the top exporter of manufacturing goods outside of London. It’s God’s own country.
But you’ll rarely hear a Yorkshire accent in the Cabinet. It’s not a twang one associates with politicians, or lawyers, or doctors. Sean Bean may have made a living off the back of his Sheffield articulation, but outside of Emmerdale and the occasional BBC gritty drama, Yorkshire is not an accent that has travelled overseas via the television. You might hear a sanitised version of it on the regional news, but nationally? Not so much.
It’s an accent synonymous with flat caps and whippets, with bread and tea salesman, with cheap broadband and coal mining and textile factories. With being working class.
Those keen to shed that image shed their accent. And thus the connotations persist.
Every time I use my Yorkshire accent, in PR and academia, it feels like a little act of rebellion. It may not wield gravitas or suggest pedigree, but it is my armour. To remove it would be to make myself vulnerable. It anchors me to Yorkshire, to my working class roots. It is a reminder of the life my dad left behind. The sacrifices he made so that I could belong.
It’s twenty-five years later and I refuse to shrink. I refuse to conform.
I aren’t ashamed.
