For small islands, Britain and Ireland have a wide variety of accents. Some can be difficult to distinguish from each other, while others, such as the more rounded Belfast accent, sound very different from a Dublin accent. When put to the test, people from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and North East England seem better at detecting someone’s accent than those living in the more southerly regions of London, Bristol and Essex. The findings are described in a study published Nov. 20 in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences.
Previous studies have shown that when groups of people want to indicate who they are for cultural reasons, their spoken accents tend to become stronger.
[Related: Why people trust accents that match their own, even when they shouldn’t. ]
“Cultural, political or even violent conflict is likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they attempt to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity,” study co-author and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge Jonathan R. Goodman said in a statement. “Even relatively mild stresses, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, can have this effect.”
“Hold up those two boiled tea bags.”
In the studythe team built a series of sentences designed to evoke the sounds of seven interesting accents: Bristol, Essex and the North East of England, Belfast in Northern Ireland, Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, Glasgow in Scotland and Receive pronunciation (RP), commonly called Standard British English. The team selected these accents to ensure a large number of contrasting phonemes between sentences.
Some of the test sentences included: “Hold up those two boiled tea bags,” “He thought a bath would make him happy,” and “Kit walked across the room.”
The team approximately 50 participants were recruited who naturally spoke with these accents and asked them to record themselves reading the test sentences. The same participants were then asked to imitate sentences in the other six randomly selected accents. The team then selected recordings that they believed were closest to the accents in question, based on how well they contained some key phonetic sounds.
[Related: These parrots have accents.]
In the first phase, participants were asked to listen to recordings made by other participants of their own accent, of both genders. For example, the Belfast accent speakers heard and rated recordings made by native Belfast speakers and ‘fake’ Belfast accents imitated by non-native speakers.
They were then asked to determine whether the accents in the recordings were authentic and whether the speaker was an accent impersonator.
In a second phase, the team recruited more than 900 participants from Great Britain and Ireland, regardless of their native accent. This created a control group for comparison and increased the sample size of native speakers. The team has gathered 11,672 comments in this phase.
Group boundaries
The participants in all groups were better than coincidence in detecting false accents, which succeeds in just over 60 percent of the cases. Those from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the North East of England were found to be better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex.
“We found a pretty pronounced difference in the detection of accent fraudsters between these areas,” says Goodman. “We think the ability to detect fake accents is related to an area’s cultural homogeneity, the extent to which its residents hold similar cultural values.”
The team argues that the accents of speakers from Belfast, Glasgow, Dublin and North East England have changed more than other accents in recent centuries. During this time there have been several instances of cultural tension between the groups, especially among people from South East England and London. This may have led to individuals from areas in Ireland and the northern regions of the United Kingdom emphasizing their accent as a signal of their social identity.
[Related: Sperm whale clans tell each other apart by their accents.]
The research shows that people from London and Essex were therefore the least able to recognize fake accents areas have less strong ‘cultural group boundaries’. Those here are more used to hearing different types of accents, so they may be less attuned to a fake accent.
“The UK is a very interesting place to study,” says Goodman. “The linguistic diversity and cultural history are so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have lived in roughly the same location for a long time. Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have developed over time, and that is a fascinating side of language evolution.”