Accent and Dialect article

If it’s good enough for a potential Prime Minister its good enough for you!

Ed Milliband, along with many other people constantly in the public eye, wants to be able to connect with their audience if not with activities they embark on, but with their voice. Your accent can determine how well you are able to connect with these audiences and Milliband has realised this. To be able to ‘impress the voters’ he wants to vote for him in the upcoming election, Milliband uses regional dialect in his campaign and converges to their socailect. This shows how some accents are more appealing than others and in this case, Received Pronunciation is not favoured among the electorates. Giles, a professor from California, conducted some research on capital punishment and what accents are seen to be more persuasive. It was found that regional accents – like what Milliband is putting on to ‘impress the voters’- is seen as more persuasive than the prestigious accent of Received Pronunciation. Therefore showing how the ‘Oxford PPE-ist’ will be more appealing to a different type of socialect.

Your intelligence should not be determined on the accent you have obtained. Why should an accent such as Scouse or Geordie be looked down upon as being unwise and foolish, Making people from Liverpool and Newcastle gain a bad reputation? Ed Milliband is from an area which has an image of being an intelligent, middle-class, high end area of London, so obviously he needs all the help he can get to connect with ‘everyday’ people from working class backgrounds. But is the Labour leader mocking the non-standard English dialect by using statements like ‘it ain’t gonna be like that’ when trying to win over the public? Elisions such as ‘ain’t’ and ‘gonna’ can be used by a range of regional dialects along with Ed Milliband using it while his natural accent is Received Pronunciation. So why should slang be labelled as the working class socialect?

Transport and technology has been expanding for many years now allowing people to have access to connect with a wider range of people from different cities to countries. This development has therefore allowed accents to travel from place to place and now cities can have a mixture of different accents within them. So why should slang be labelled as the working class socialect? If people from Chelsea, a high end area of London, now being able to move to the Bristolian speaking city of Bristol easily, then surely these people will pick up some  ‘gurt lush’ Bristol dialect? Even if a Cambridge university graduate moves to Bristol and picks up some non-standard English phrases like ‘alright me lover’ and ‘proper job’, this does not mean that there intelligence has slipped. It just means that they are exploring new ways of communicating, and personally… I find it interesting learning new ways to say the same phrase.

The way you speak does not determine your intelligence and Berstein and Labov prove this. These researchers found that there is no clear link between spoken language and logical thoughts. So by Milliband using regional dialect, is he actually ‘mocking’ the working class intelligence? Surely he as a potential Prime Minister wants to seem wise and intellectual. By a frequently televised politician using laid back dialect and an approachable accent alongside it, surely people with these regional accents should also be seen as welcoming, intelligent and most of all…employable? Morrison’s don’t think so. They have quoted ‘nobody from Liverpool please’ when promoting job offers to the public. With Berstein and Labov’s results, it is proven that people with regional accents can be as intelligent as someone speaking in Received Pronunciation. If the Labour leader believes in using ‘everyday’ accents and dialect to ‘impress the voters’, why is the public themselves pushing away these unique accents?