As the popularity of the recent New York Times dialect quiz reminds us, we're fascinated by what our speech says about who we are. But what happens when telling "us" from "them" becomes a dangerous pursuit?by Darran Anderson / February 26, 2019 / Leave a comment
In the poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ from his 1975 collection North, Seamus Heaney encapsulated the dangers in Northern Irish speech during the Troubles. This was a “land of password, handgrip, wink and nod”; a place where language could be read for clues as to the religious background and political persuasion. Accents, pronunciations and differences in word usage were shibboleths that could give identity away. If a person said Derry rather than Londonderry, for example, they were likely a Catholic Nationalist or Republican as opposed to a Protestant Unionist or Loyalist. The same went for pronouncing ‘H’ or ‘Aitch’. In a country where being in the wrong place at the wrong time proved perilous, such linguistic clues could, and did, prove fatal.
Recently, a New York Times dialect quiz covering the UK and Ireland went viral on social media. Type in your preferred word for grandmother or playing truant, or your pronunciation of “scone,” and it would tell you—with varying degrees of accuracy—where on these islands you’d lived. This patchwork of dialects is light-hearted but fascinating, even if the individual recounting of results, like dreams, is more fascinating to the teller than the told.
It shows, for instance, how an individual’s language alters as they move around, leaving a trail on the map. Often the person is unaware of having picked up linguistic traits in a new home until they return to where they grew up and are judged accordingly. Dig deeper into dialects and there lies a multifaceted subject of migration and isolation, trades and demographics, class and faith. There is, in effect, history and sociology not just in how words are formed on paper but also on the tongue.
While projects like the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets focus on languages facing the risk of extinction, dialects appear robust and are celebrated as signs of diversity. Yet several decades ago, Received Pronunciation was a pre-requisite not just in the media but in many professions. In the 1990s, at the same school that Heaney studied at, we undertook speech lessons to encourage confidence in public speaking but also to minimise traces of vernacular accent in order to improve our chances of future employment “across the water.” Comprehension was given as the excuse for homogenisation, with RP being treated…