The team recruited 27 five-year-olds and then played them three accents: Standard Southern British English (SSBE) – a contemporary version of Received Pronunciation – Yorkshire and Essex.
Their findings were pretty unilateral – across all measures the children associated someone with the SSBE accent, typically described as middle class, as being clever, while they linked the Yorkshire accent to a lack of intelligence.
I am actively raising my three-year-old to have my accent, rather than my partner’s. My other half was born and raised in Yorkshire and has a very nice (to my mind, rather sexy) Yorkshire accent – the exact accent that the children in the University of Essex study associated with lesser intelligence.
This isn’t just my policy – not by a long shot. I noticed a year or so ago that my partner had taken to saying bath, grass and dance with a long A sound, rather than a short one, as is natural to him, without me saying anything because he wants her to have my “posh” accent.
Terrible, right? In my defence, none of us feel very good about the fact that we’ve slipped into running a toddler elocution academy. But the truth is, we both know the privilege that comes from sounding like I do. He’s softened his original accent into a sort of BBC Yorkshire burr to avoid the constant “Ey Up Chuck” microaggressions that Londoners seem to think funny – because the sad truth is that sounding posh often makes your life easier.
square CHARLENE WHITE
Changing my accent helped me into my career - but now I've reclaimed it
Read MoreIt’s a bit of a vicious circle, I suppose. The Jodie Comers of the world have every right to change their accent, consciously or otherwise, just as my partner has every right to raise his London-based kids to sound like Prince George. But the more we assimilate our accents, the more we perpetuate the idea that cleverness and poshness are mutually inclusive, and on and on the same problem goes.
My upper-middle-class tones give me the same sort of vocal privilege that Boris Johnson and the like benefit from – even if we’re talking nonsense, people hear the poshness and think I’m making some kind of point.
I can’t afford to give my daughter many of the staggering privileges that I grew up with. Private education is firmly off the table, and I doubt that she’ll be riding a pony more than once a year or having extra French tuition before her Latin classes. But the one thing I can make sure she has is my advantageous accent – however problematic that might be.
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