Yorkshire Named Top Twang As Brummie Brogue Comes Bottom

Hi,

For the next three posts I will be talking about three texts that I have read and how they relate to the material that has been covered during the English Language and Literature lessons.

 The first text, “Yorkshire named top twang as Brummie brogue comes bottom” is an article talking about one study which proved that people with a Birmingham accent- also known as Brummie- are usually considered less intellectual than people using the Yorkshire twang. Ironically, the article mentions that even people that say nothing are sometimes considered smarter than the people with Birmingham accent. The article goes into detail relating to how a research was conducted in order to prove the affirmations above. People have been asked to listen to some recordings of women models talking and in the same time the researchers have used pictures of the models. However, the voices of the models were mixed up so that they won’t correspond to the picture of the actual speaker. The three accents that were used in the recordings the participants have listened to were Brummie, Yorkshire and RP which is also known as Received Pronunciation, being considered the Standard English accent. After the participants have given their rating for the models, the results indicated that the persons which have been attributed a Brummie accent obtained a lower average score than both the RP’s and Yorkshire’s average scores.
I can say that this article is strongly related to the material that has been covered in class and one reason for this would be that the situation from the article is very similar to the one presented in the text “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan that has been presented in detail in my previous post, where the author has to deal with the stereotypes related to her ethnicity. Being Asian, the author is expected to have bad English and she is told that “[her] true abilities lay in math and science”. By comparison, in the article, the stereotypes are based on the dialect that people are using and these dialects are generating preconceptions of how intelligent a person might be. As the author mentions, these stereotypes are generated by the “criminal activity” in Birmingham which is associated with “low intelligence”. Personally, I think this article is not only trying to show how persons who speak a specific dialect can be discriminated but also to put accent on how some people think that one dialect is better than another which is equivalent to thinking that one language is better than another. Both these ideas are wrong since you cannot compare two languages and say that one is better than the second only because the second doesn’t conform to the rules of the first one. This was also the case in the text “Good English and Bad” by Bill Bryson where we are informed about how some English expressions are considered bad or wrong because they don’t “conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago”.