You Are Your Voice
The comedian Tony Law is a remarkable and fascinating performer, and at a performance of his most recent show, he modulated between at least four or five accents — a turn of the century prospector, a Californian teenage girl, an upper middle-class Englishman extolling the virtues of recovery from addiction, a man from Lancashire refusing to go to the Pompidou Centre despite its architectural significance. However, on the one or two occasions where his story required that he use his original, rural Canadian accent, he disavowed it, saying he can barely remember what he used to sound like. When he tried to impersonate his father, he collapsed into a sequence of gutteral sounds before the end of the sentence.
After seeing this performance, I found myself unusually aware of my accent — in particular, the fact that I say “well ‘un” instead of “well done”. I can explain this to myself in material terms, because my accent is only partly built for use with the English language. The fact that I cut off certain consonants is a hangover from the Welsh system of mutations which enable words to flow together more seamlessly. A similar example of the impact of an older language distorting the newer language would be the Cornish term “nimet”, a term for lunch based on the English words “noon meat”. Of course, knowing why I say these words in this way doesn’t explain why I find it embarrassing, or why things like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj5Hai-3y7I make my skin crawl.
The standardisation of language was a feature of the simultaneous rise of the nation state and capitalism. As production and trade became both more common-place and more complex, the need to have people from different parts of the country understand each other verbally and in writing drove both the state and individuals to strive towards a common language. Before, a smaller number of people were required to manage these tasks, and were taught professional languages like Latin, or linguas franca like, well, French. The illiteracy and relative lack of mobility of the vast majority of people meant that it was possible to live life speaking a variant of the local language that wouldn’t be understood 50 miles down the road. There are these totally or partially isolated languages alive today — even in the UK. Due to the fact that Welsh did not become the official language of Wales, and therefore was not standardised and taught until far later, different dialects of Welsh often have different words for the same thing, and conversations between people of different dialects often collapse into a discussion of the words that are being used.
Capitalism is a story of formal equality — all men are created equal, each man is free to work to the best of his ability — tempered by material inequality — vast income inequality between classes, regions, races, the sexes and so on. In the same way that people are free to labour but are constrained by the opportunities afforded to them and their need to eat, the spreading of literacy and the simplification of language gave billions the opportunity to use language in ways that were previously unavailable to them, but they found this constrained by a set of formal and informal rules, and across the world, this process also entailed the attempted and often successful destruction of existing languages.
The form of English that is understood as standard and, more importantly, good, in Britain aligns neatly with the form of English in use in the actual corridors of power, in Eton, Oxford, Westminster — basically, the English of the rich of South East England and London. This constraint of language is seen as its most clear and therefore most absurd in the rules that govern speech in Parliament, where you are somehow supposed to discuss politics without referring by name to anyone in the place, and you can’t call any one of the often drunk people there “drunk” without being censured. This dynamic, of adhering to strict and often mysterious speech rules in work, percolates all the way down to every one of us who’s ever noticed their ‘work voice’.
With a work voice, you attempt to puff yourself up and present yourself as powerful by adopting at least some of the speech and language morés of whichever is the regional power centre. In the UK, large call centres are clustered in economically depressed regions — the North East, the Central Belt in Scotland, South Wales — with distinctive and marginal accents. In order to fulfill their role for whichever company employs them, accents have to be flattened, and a flatter accent is necessarily a more South East English accent. However, there is some evidence that in the North East and Liverpool, the accent is becoming more distinctive — whether this is due to economic marginality or active disavowal is unclear.
It’d be a mistake to think that this kind of language policing is something that comes only from the top down. As language solidified, ambitious, clever, craven and/or grasping people from the peripheries adopted the speech and language habits of the powerful and some of these achieved success. Working-class parents sent their children to elocution lessons, generations of people shed their accents like old skins.
Online is rife with language policing. Social media has uncovered a public with an unquenchable thirst for typos in lieu of jokes, choirs of red-faced men bent on calling any public figure younger than them, who dares to have a regional accent, “thick”. An entire media class subsists on its own complaints regarding ‘trolls’ breaking the rules they’ve spent a life adhering to.
An apparent countertendency to this is the fascination with things like Scottish dialect twitter, where someone saying “am no a grass” is considered to be heroic and hilarious in and of itself. While this appears to be celebratory and inclusive, it pivots on the assumption that there is a true form of English, and treats Scottish dialect as a charming curio. The same thing can be seen with Black twitter in the US, a praise which feels a lot like mockery.
The political revolutions that coincided with the formalisation of languages and the spread of capitalism are littered with references to ‘the voice of the people’, presented as one coherent statement, whereas the reality is that this voice may not have been understood a day’s journey away from its proclamation. In contrast, the social movements that prefigure socialism, at their best, offer the possibility of the entry of a polyphony of voices into the discourse. This opening threatens the control by a tiny minority of not just resources and power, but of human creativity and expression at its most basic. Part of the world that socialists are fighting for is the right to speak freely, whether that involves calling someone a slug on twitter or calling a clearly drunk MP a fucking drunk. A world without embarrassment about being yourself and sounding like who you are.
