This video on accents was nice –a welcome diversion. In truth, it devoured the time I’d planned to spend writing something original, so I’m sharing it instead.
It’s by Dr Geoff Lindsey, a linguist whose work I rate highly. Using Gary Stevenson and Jimmy the Giant as case studies, he explores how accents quietly gatekeep credibility and upward mobility in Britain. The experiment is clever, the cultural archaeology even better.
Watching it as an American raised in New England, I found the whole exercise oddly revealing. I can distinguish the accents, but I don’t carry the surrounding freight, so I was pulled more by persuasion than by prejudice. The Eliza Doolittle caricature feels distant enough to resist belief; Gary and Jimmy’s ‘poshified’ voices do not.
And of course, we have our own mess. In the US, Southern accents are coded as low-status, no matter the speaker’s education, yet many outsiders find them charming. Each side of the Atlantic has its class machinery; the gears are simply cut differently.
Philosophics 