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Having just come back from two weeks in London and Belfast, this article is particularly germane for me:

"The Irish and Scots Aren’t Fooled by Your Fake Accent:  Some cultures are better than others at spotting impostors. The skill could allow them to pick out outsiders trying to infiltrate their groups."  By Eric Niiler, WSJ (12'16/24)

I love to hear Scots and Irish speak, although often I cannot understand all that they are saying.  Twenty and more years ago, the head circulation librarian at my university had such a mellifluous lilt that I would sometimes check out books when she was on duty just to hear her sweet tongue, but I had no idea which particular variety of Scottish (I think) she was speaking.

…

Residents of Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and northeast England are better at detecting fake regional accents than Londoners and people from other points south, a study published in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences has found. 

When people listened to short sentences spoken by native and non-native speakers, those from the northern U.K. could tell whether the recordings of their own region’s accent were real or fake 65% to 85% of the time. Residents of Essex, London and Bristol in the south ranged from around 50% to 75%.

The researchers suspect the ability to detect fake accents is connected to an area’s cultural similarity and could reflect how the civilization evolved to identify outsiders trying to infiltrate the group, according to Jonathan R. Goodman, lead author of the study. 

In places where cultural boundaries aren’t as strong, such as in sprawling and diverse London, the study showed the abilities to detect fake accents were just above chance. 

“Whereas when you got up to Belfast, it was like 85% of the answers were right,” Goodman, a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Cambridge Public Health, said. “It was a shockingly high difference.”

To conduct their study, the researchers recruited 50 native speakers of seven regional accents, which they defined as Belfast and Dublin in Ireland; Glasgow in Scotland; northeast England; and Essex, Bristol and London in the south of England. 

Study participants were asked to speak sentences such as “Hold up those two cooked tea bags,” “She kicked the goose hard with her foot,” and “He thought a bath would make him happy.” They were then asked to mimic the six accents they didn’t speak. The authors worked with a phonetic expert to determine which of the mimics sounded most realistic. Afterward, they played a mix of real accents and convincing fakes to a sample of 900 native speakers of the seven accents and asked them to identify which were authentic and which weren’t.

Cynthia Clopper, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University who wasn’t involved in the work, said it is possible that some people are just better at detecting a fluent speaker of a regional accent. 

“It could also just be that the accents themselves have different features that are more or less difficult to imitate, or that listeners are more or less sensitive to,” she said.

You can test your own ability to spot a shammer. The study authors put together a publicly available online audio quiz to test accent-detecting ability.

In Belfast, it gets even more complicated and sophisticated.  As soon as you open your mouth, people can tell whether you're Protestant or Catholic, because the latter are sequestered in mostly homogeneous neighborhoods.

Selected readings

• "Brogue" (11/10/19)
• "Hiberno-English on the rise" (12/22/22)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]

December 19, 2024 @ 5:05 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Accents, Language and religion, Topolects

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