For small islands, Great Britain and Ireland are home to a wide variety of accents. Some can be difficult to distinguish from one another, while others like the more rounded voweled Belfast accent sounds very different from a Dublin accent. When put to the test, people from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, and northeastern England appear to be better at detecting a person’s accent than those who live in the more southern regions of London, Bristol, and Essex. The findings are described in a study published November 20 in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences.
Earlier 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 are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity,” study co-author and University of Cambridge postdoctoral researcher Jonathan R. Goodman said in a statement. “Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect.”
‘Hold up those two cooked tea bags’
In the study, the team built a series of sentences designed to elicit the sounds of seven accents of interest–Bristol, Essex, and the northeast of England, Belfast in Northern Ireland, Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, Glasgow in Scotland, and Received Pronunciation (RP), commonly called standard British English. The team selected these accents to ensure a high number of contrasting phonemes between sentences.
Some of the test sentences included: “Hold up those two cooked tea bags,” “He thought a bath would make him happy,” and “Kit strutted across the room.”
The team recruited around 50 participants who naturally spoke with these accents and asked them to record themselves reading the test sentences. The same participants were then asked to mimic sentences in the other six accents chosen randomly. The team then selected recordings which they judged as the closest to the accents in question based on how well they included some key phonetic sounds.
[Related: These parrots have accents.]
In the first phase, participants were asked to listen to the recordings made by other participants of their own accents, of both genders. For example, the Belfast accent speakers heard and judged recordings made of native Belfast speakers and “fake” Belfast accents being 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-mimic.
In a second phase, the team recruited over 900 participants from the United Kingdom and Ireland, regardless of their native accent. This created a control group for comparison and increased the native speaker sample sizes. The team collected 11,672 responses in this phase.
Group boundaries
The participants across all groups were better than chance at detecting fake accents, succeeding just over 60 percent of the time. Those from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, and the northeast of England proved better detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex.
“We found a pretty pronounced difference in accent cheater detection between these areas,” said Goodman. “We think that the ability to detect fake accents is linked to an area’s cultural homogeneity, the degree to which its people hold similar cultural values.”
The team argues that the accents of speakers from Belfast, Glasgow, Dublin, and northeast England have changed more over the past several centuries than other accents. During this time, there have been multiple cases of between-group cultural tension, particularly involving those from southeast England and London. This may have caused individuals from areas in Ireland and the northern regions of the United Kingdom to put an emphasis on their accent as a signal of their social identity.
[Related: Sperm whale clans tell each other apart by their accents.]
The study suggests that those from London and Essex were the least able to spot fake accents because these areas have less strong “cultural group boundaries.” Those here are more used to hearing different kinds of accents, which might make them less attuned to a fake accent.
“The UK is a really interesting place to study,” Goodman said. “The linguistic diversity and cultural history is so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have been roughly in the same location for a really long time. Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have emerged over time, and that’s a fascinating side of language evolution.”
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