Affected brogue
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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]
Victor Mair said,
December 19, 2024 @ 6:24 am
From Conall Mallory, a lifelong resident of Belfast:
This is great. I scored 10/12 on the test, thus affirming my Belfast ability to identify the mimics!
KeithB said,
December 19, 2024 @ 8:47 am
When I was working in a feedstore during college, we had a lady customer that would come in to provide bird food. As a PBS watcher and U2 fan, I had a pretty good ear for "English" accents and brogues. I could not place hers, so I finally got the nerve to ask. She was from South Africa.
If Musk would retain more of his SA accent, his poison pills might go down better.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
December 19, 2024 @ 9:01 am
Ha ha! — 7/14 for me: a coin-flip. That wouldn't qualify me to be Dick van Dyke's dialect coach.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 19, 2024 @ 10:05 am
Isn't the London area full of people who came from other parts of the UK and have partly-but-not-completely shifted toward London/Southeastern pronunciation, so you maybe hear a wider range of "local" accents there. Plus you're invested in the place being a magnet attracted migrants both domestic and international and not so much on guard against "infiltrators." Belfast, by contrast, might be the sort of not-so-thriving place where if you weren't born and raised there it seems inherently suspicious to many of the locals that you would want to move there. (The Belfast accent is one of my favorites to listen to out of the British-Isles range of offerings, but I've never attempted to mimic it myself.)
Re KeithB's anecdote, one of my kids at one point in elementary school had a long-term substitute teacher who had grown up in South Africa but then emigrated in her maybe early/mid teens to New Zealand, where she spent another decade or two before eventually coming to the U.S. So you had a blend of two different not-oft-head-in-the-US accents.
Julian said,
December 19, 2024 @ 4:56 pm
I liked the algorithm's comment on my score at the end:
"Well done! You scored 4 out of 14."
I'm a sucker for positive reinforcement.
Julian said,
December 19, 2024 @ 5:13 pm
"I love to hear Scots and Irish speak, although often I cannot understand all that they are saying."
In 1972 I was waiting for a train at Thurso, the northernmost town of Scotland.
Two old guys in British Rail uniforms were chatting nearby.
I was interested in language from a young age, so I was eavesdropping furiously.
After a while I said, "excuse me, fellas, I hope you don't mind me asking – you were talking Gaelic then, were you?"
"No – English."
charles antaki said,
December 19, 2024 @ 5:16 pm
"The head circulation librarian" made me pause for a moment.
Kenny Easwaran said,
December 19, 2024 @ 6:07 pm
It seems plausible that there's also an effect where the London and southeast accent are more widely heard in other parts of the country, so that people are able to do more convincing imitations of it.
Vampyricon said,
December 19, 2024 @ 10:26 pm
9/14! Woo! My test-taking subroutine got the better of me and I thought there's a mimic and a genuine for each accent, but judging by my score that's not the case.
Wish we could see which was real and which was fake tho
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2024 @ 5:01 am
50% —but what surprised me was that after the first (?Belfast?), all the others were low-RP. Are the stimuli (after the first) based on the respondent's answer to "Are you a native speaker of …" ?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
December 20, 2024 @ 9:16 am
I love that both a native Englishman and a life-long American did no better than chance at this. But how do you determine which accent is "authentic'?
RP is easy — Bernard Mayes!
But which is the "authentic" Brummie — Paul Scofield or Geezer Butler?
TR said,
December 20, 2024 @ 11:47 am
10/14, though I picked "low confidence" for most of them. It's too bad they don't tell you which ones you got wrong.
What's a "genuine" RP accent, anyway? The whole point of RP is that it's, well, R.
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2024 @ 12:13 pm
Well, if a Brummie (say) were to speak with an RP accent, then unless said Brummie were a member of the landed gentry, one would be able infer that the accent was not genuine, would one not ? The reason for excluding members of the landed gentry was based on personal experience — I once had the somewhat embarrassing experience of asking someone with a very high RP accent how long he had lived on the Isle of Mull (none of the locals had anything other than a pure Scots accent) and in tones that could only be said to be "cut-glass" he replied "Well, the family have been lairds here for a century or so, but of course I was sent away to public school at a very early age so never had the opportunity to acquire the local accent". A small prize for the first person to correctly identify said laird.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
December 20, 2024 @ 12:27 pm
Philip,
There's a similar phenomenon extant here. More times than I can count, I mistake native Pittsburghers for outsiders whenever said native Pittsburghers have adopted what I call "generic college guy/girl speak". Especially when the "uptalk" element shatters the standard convention of _nearly always_ ending phrases (even questions!) with a falling intonation (with perhaps a rising intonation on the penult or antepenult).
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2024 @ 1:20 pm
In re your earlier comment about Bernard Mayes, Benjamin, I was inspired by your comment to seek him out on YouTube, until I was told "YouTube doesn't allow ad-blockers". At which point, "goodbye, YouTube".
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
December 20, 2024 @ 1:44 pm
Ha! Good on ya, mate!
Anyway, if you'd like to listen to, say, 150 consecutive hours of Bernard Mayes (the man narrates my dreams now), you can do what I'm doing and borrow "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" audiobook, Blackstone edition from your local library.
Colin Watson said,
December 20, 2024 @ 2:26 pm
In my experience as a Belfast native – I grew up there in the 1980s and 1990s – it is not really the case that people there can distinguish Protestants and Catholics by accent alone. It's true that there's quite a lot of segregation and that people can detect where you're from at quite a fine grain – down to only a few miles in places – but still the original claim overstates things a bit.
What certainly is true, or at least was 20 years ago, is that there are a number of shibboleths which can be used quite accurately; which is why there was occasionally the bizarre local spectacle of stochastic violence starting by the victim being asked to recite the alphabet. (The letters A and H are each pronounced differently across the sectarian divide.)
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2024 @ 2:45 pm
Thank you, Benjamin — now downloading a copy …
TR said,
December 20, 2024 @ 3:21 pm
Philip, what about people who acquired RP later in life than your Scottish laird but use it as their everyday accent (at least in some settings) — is their RP "genuine" or "mimicked"? The distinction seems murky in the case of an accent that is often deliberately learned (though I realize such cases are much less numerous today than they used to be).
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
December 20, 2024 @ 3:31 pm
Interesting, what TR said. Is RP (or Estuary, even) something like "Modern Standard Arabic", which few people speak colloquially, but which is "accepted" as the ideal standard for the language?
Should the U.S. have something like that? According to Wikipedia, the median population center lies in Gibson County, Indiana, so why not pick that 'lect? Here's a sample of a female and male voice — https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/newly-elected-gibson-county-officials-sworn-in/vi-AA1wbWWa
I'd say that's about as "accent-free" as one can get.
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2024 @ 4:07 pm
« is [the accent of people who acquired RP later in life than my Scottish laird] RP "genuine" or "mimicked" » — a very good question, TR, the answer to which hinges (I think) on whether they thereafter use only RP or whether they code-switch into RP from their earlier accent whenever it seems appropriate (or advantageous) so to do. In general (but based solely on personal observation), I think that those "born" to speak RP rarely if ever lapse into a "lesser" (inferior) accent, but are usually able to affect such an accent for humorous effect.
Chas Belov said,
December 21, 2024 @ 12:51 am
I'm not good at identifying accents, but I apparently soak them up like a sponge.
My accent is a mix of eastern and western Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and people have occasionally guessed it was somewhere in New York. I used to have a neighbor from somewhere in the South, and by the time I would converse with him for half an hour I'd be talking with a southern accent. I was aware of it happening and I was so afraid he'd think I was making fun of him.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 21, 2024 @ 10:11 am
While Mr. Orsatti's Modest Proposal for a Gibson County norm is mathematically clever, the traditional conventional wisdom was and may still be that a certain sort of ideal AmEng was typically found significantly farther west, in the region of places like Omaha or Salt Lake City. If you grew up there you needed the least dialect-coach work if you wanted to become e.g. a tv newscaster or extremely-generic Hollywood actor, because your idiolect would have the fewest features that would strike other American ears as regionalisms. It wasn't so much a "prestige" accent as an unmarked/neutral one. Sort of friendly/informal-by-default yet without sounding rustic, and capable of being used in more formal registers when needed. Maybe a close-enough study with spectrograms etc. would in fact detect some distinctive regional features out there, but whether for perceptual or sociological reasons they aren't ones that "stick out" in practice and get consciously noticed.
Jason M said,
December 22, 2024 @ 2:13 pm
11/14, but a strange test for someone like me with pretty much broadcast-standard central Illinois accent with parents from southern Iowa. I have no idea what an Essex accent should sound like, and I have spent only a day or two in Bristol and don’t remember the accent being particularly memorable vs, more obvious Glasgow and Belfast. For that matter, never been to Belfast but watching Day of the Jackal now so a lot of actors portraying some approximation of it. I also remember watching a powerful documentary featuring Belfast poetry from years ago that stuck aurally in my mind. The Glasgow examples were super toned-down vs what I encountered even in my first cab ride there.
I think the exercise is less about knowing what the accent should sound like vs being able to tell people mimicking vs speaking naturally. Would be good to know which ones we get wrong on the site, as mentioned above.