Recent research has highlighted that Essex and London accents are deemed less intelligent. Dr David Hornsby, an expert in sociolinguistics in the University of Kent’s Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, comments on how these findings indicate that language is closely tied to class. He said:
‘UK accents contain a regional and social element, and generally speaking, a ‘broad’ regional or local accent tends to be associated with working-class social status. A common finding in sociolinguistic studies where ‘matched guise’ techniques have been employed (i.e. informants are asked to evaluate the same content in different accents, without seeing or knowing anything about the speakers) is that regional accents are rated lower in terms of education or intelligence, but often rated more positively for ‘friendliness’ or ‘trustworthiness’, perhaps because people with accents associated with their locality are perceived to be good members of their community and ‘team players’. The surprise here is that Cockney (traditional East London) and modern Essex accents (which share many of the same forms) don’t seem to be well viewed on any dimension.
‘I have to declare an interest here: I’m an ‘Essex boy’ (from Southend) who spent his first six years in Newham, East London, and the negative associations of those local accents are certainly nothing new. If you heard a Cockney character in a tv drama in the 60s or 70s, they were invariably a crook, an ex-con, or a dodgy businessman. But there seems to have been something of an ideological shift since then.
‘We’ve always had self-appointed ‘experts’ who tell us to ‘speak properly’, but the underlying assumption behind the negative responses reported in this study seems to be that, if you can’t speak ‘properly’ in what is generally seen to be the most prosperous region of the UK, then there’s something wrong with you: you’ve been ‘left behind’ or – worse – you’re a ‘chav’. Ironically, the democratisation of higher education – with nearly 50% of 18-year-olds now attending as opposed to 8-9% when I was an undergraduate – may have entrenched negative attitudes. Bringing people together from many parts of the country and beyond, universities tend to favour ‘levelled’, or less regionally marked accents, but stigmatise those of people who are more rooted in the communities where they live and work.
‘Underlying all this may be an assumption that Britain is basically an egalitarian, socially mobile place in which anyone can ‘make it’ which, as Miles Lloyd points out, does not in fact seem to be borne out in senior level appointments, where there’s been little change. Two of our last three Prime Ministers attended the same elite public school, as indeed did 18 of their predecessors.’