Still posh

I've always found regional accents fascinating and rather charming, as long as they aren't so thick as to be indeciph-erable (Glaswegian for example). But there's a lot of prejudice against certain accents. My mum hated the cockney accent, which she saw as ugly and grating.

I love the Liverpudlian accent, also the Australian and Irish accents. Apart from anything else, they make a nice change from the posh English accent, which is still the one you hear most in movies and on TV.

People read all sorts of things into accents. Whether someone is trustworthy, whether they behave well or badly, whether they're acceptably British or not, whether they're employable or not.

And those prejudices change from one year to the next. Regional British accents used to be seen as off-putting and quaint, but now they're often sought after because many people find them warmer and friendlier than posh English, which can come across as cold and arrogant.

My own accent is still posh English, despite being in Northern Ireland for twenty years. It can be hard to shed a well-established accent even if everyone around you has a different one. People who speak English as a second language quite often still have the accent of their original language, however much they try to lose it.

I find it rather ridiculous when politicians try to boost their popularity by erasing their posh English delivery and putting on a more proletarian accent. Those folk with the genuine article must find such antics absurdly unconvincing.

Oo do they fink they're fooling, guv?

Pic: Cockney money slang. Godivas, fivers; monkeys, £500; ponies, £25; edges, 50p; carpets, £30.

Posh gits

I have a very posh English voice. Not sure why. As a child, I never lived in posh areas, and my parents never sounded posh. Probably it comes from attending a pseudo-posh boarding school for pretentious middle-class twits, or rather their pretentious middle-class parents.

Whether my posh voice is an advantage or a liability, I've never quite decided. Sometimes with trades people and shop assistants and call centre staff it seems to get me more respect and better service. And they often call me sir, which is ridiculous but it seems pedantic to object.

At other times it probably gets me worse service because people promptly nail me as a snooty English git and give me the minimum respect and service they can get away with. Of course I'm assuming that because they'd never openly admit it. But anti-English sentiments often lurk under polite Northern Irish exteriors.

The stereotype isn't entirely false either. The English can be very snooty indeed if it suits them. They whine and whinge about everything and customer service is never quite good enough for them. Whereas the locals tend to be more laid back and more inclined to adjust to a situation than complain. But I digress....

I've never had any wish to change my voice. I know some people find a posh tone embarrassing and they deliberately change it to something more ordinary like Estuary English or a regional accent. But my voice doesn't bother me, I think partly because I like it, partly because I'm so used to it and partly because I don't have to listen to it. To me it's just a sort of bland vibration inside my head.

But I do object to the surfeit of oily posh voices on TV, and the lack of shall-we-say vocal diversity. When do you hear any alternative accent, be it regional, ethnic, cockney or whatever? Not often. Which is a shame because there are some wonderful accents out there. Starting with Irish and Northern Irish.

So that's abart it, guv. Nuffink more to tell yer. Gawd bless.

English as she ain't spoke

I find most regional and foreign accents fascinating, but I'm surprised how many people find some of them so unpleasant or repulsive they'd like to get rid of them altogether.

My mum finds the London cockney accent or "Estuary English" very unattractive. She thinks people who speak like that should have elocution lessons and learn to talk proper Queen's English.

What an awful thought. Can you imagine if everyone in London spoke like those bland BBC newsreaders, all smoothed-out vowels and slightly toffee-nosed delivery? Spoke like me in other words, with my posh public-school diction. It would give me the heebie-jeebies. I love to hear an infinite range of accents and pronunciation, it's exciting and intriguing.

I love all the regional accents too - Northern English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish. In fact in Northern Ireland there are almost as many accents as there are towns, and you can usually tell which town someone comes from by the way they speak. But some people object to regional accents as being a weird perversion of standard English. As if there's only one "normal" way of speaking the language. Variety is the spice of life, I say. Why should everything be standardised?

Then there are all the foreign accents of people from other countries. English with an Italian or German lilt. English with an American or Aussie twang. For some people, a foreign accent is an instant cue for prejudice and a show of superiority. Such arrogance! We should be admiring those people who've taken the trouble to master another language, or even several languages. And we should be ashamed of the general British inability to be multilingual.

I think it's sad when someone with a strong regional accent feels obliged to fake "standard" English for job purposes, because they think their natural accent is a liability. Sometimes the result is embarrassingly false and exaggerated. But apparently some call centres prefer staff with regional accents, which are seen as warmer and friendlier than the flat, aloof-sounding London accent. Good for them.

The more accents the better. Ain't that the troof, guv?