The enduring power of an accent

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is a researcher based at Cambridge university and the author of the upcoming ‘Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Co-operative World’

How people speak can matter more than what they say. Ukrainian soldiers use specific phonemes — pronounced parts of words — that Russian speakers struggle with in order to tell friends from enemies. Remarkably, the biblical story of Shibboleth echoes the same idea: thousands of years ago, a victorious tribe killed the defeated, by finding those who could say only “Sibboleth” — a trait that, according to the scriptures, led to the deaths of more than 40,000 people.

Determining a person’s social origins through language is an ancient practice, and highlights just how important small linguistic differences are to notions of society and identity. This is the consequence of how we have evolved. Over the course of history, we’ve needed to place trust in strangers carefully: to be biased towards those who appear or sound like us, and against those who seem different. 

Today, we often joke about the signals that constitute accents of languages worldwide. We use them in our everyday social relations to learn something about the people we meet. Yet where there is tension between groups, these markers can quickly become serious — reigniting our tribalistic instincts.

These forces have an enduring power, as we found in a research project I led at Cambridge. We asked 1,000 people from across the UK and Ireland to guess if someone was faking one of seven regional accents. They were good at this, finding a cheat in about two-thirds of cases regardless of where the listener was from or what the false accent was.

Interestingly, this varied across regions: people from places that have historic cultural tensions with the south of the UK were better at telling whether someone was faking the listener’s own accent. Someone from Belfast, for instance, could tell a faked Belfast accent about 75 per cent of the time, while someone who spoke what is regarded as standard British English was right just over half the time.

Many people have asked about this regional difference: why should people from Belfast or Glasgow be better at spotting cheats than those from southern England? I think the answer lies in the tribalism that we have evolved to exhibit, for better and for worse. (At times in Belfast, as in Ukraine today, having the wrong accent has had severe consequences.) Historic tensions within and between cultural groups have almost certainly led to heightened emphasis on social identity, and a greater need to be able to tell friends from enemies. Tribalism resurfaces when people need it.

But accents also explain how trust forms among people, and serve as shibboleths through which we categorise them.

How we interpret them can even affect policy, such as through linguistic assessment for the determination of origin, which is used by governments including in the UK. For this, trained linguists interview someone seeking asylum to determine if they are from, say, Syria, rather than Iraq. A mis-step can result in deportation — and the test’s use suggests just how much speech patterns infect every level of our lives. This is despite questions about whether it really works, or if linguistic patterns are often too complex for anyone but a native listener to discern effectively.

Accents are facets of human communication, which is in turn the means through which we can be honest or deceive. The sociologist Diego Gambetta, who specialises in the criminal underworld in Italy, says mafia members would sometimes menacingly disguise their accents in phone conversations to associate themselves with areas of Sicily known to be more dangerous. And often unconsciously, people change their accents to reflect those of people around them — an example of what sociolinguists call code-switching, which can help build social relationships.

The uses of these signals are varied and fluid, but can have serious effects on both speaker and listener. Our accents can tell others about our social identity, showcase our authenticity (or lack thereof) and enable us to tell friends from enemies.

Yet today, with tribalistic signals becoming increasingly strong across the political spectrum, we should remember that it is in the interests of extremists across the world to keep people divided by markers of affiliation — and to focus on signals that split us rather than ideas that unify. So when you next hear a different accent, don’t see it as a separation marker. Take the opportunity to engage with someone new.