Flattening in England, resurgent in Scotland: accents still shape our island life
South of the border, dialects are discussed as a matter of interest. North of the border, they really matter
Accents might be seen as the failure of speech to match some imaginary norm. What’s odd in Glasgow seems ordinary in Essex, and vice versa; and what was ordinary yesterday seems extraordinary now. In Ma’am Darling, Craig Brown’s recently published (and very entertaining) biographical study of Princess Margaret, the author devotes a chapter to the princess’s stilted encounter in 1981 with Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs. “Ma’am, have you a big collection of records?” the presenter begins reverentially. “Ears, quate,” says the princess. “Have you kept your old 78s?” Plomley ploughs on. “Oh, ears,” the princess replies, “they’re all velly carefully preserved.”
The “ears” is baffling until Brown discloses that that’s how she says “yes”, just as she says “nyair” for “no” and “velly” for “very”; and of course the short “a” now commonly rendered as an “e” in comic transcriptions of Brief Encounter: “Eh hev them up in the ettic, eckshleh,” HRH says when Plomley wonders where her 78rpms are kept. Or rather, that’s what Craig Brown hears. When I find the recording of that episode in the BBC archive, I hear something different. “Yes” sounds more or less like “yes”. No matter how often I say “ears” aloud, I can’t hear a “yes” lurking inside it.
Then it occurs to me that, having grown up in Scotland, I sound the “r”. People in England tend to skip the “r” as the final consonant and say “ee-uh” or “ee-ah”. To them this pronunciation is standard. So to reach an understanding of the princess’s pronunciation, we must also understand the author’s. Sure enough, when I try “ee-uhs”, I catch the “ya” that’s often present in the upper-class affirmative, spoken from the back of the throat – and there is, of course, something of that in Princess Margaret.
Many fewer people speak this way now, and almost none of them can be heard with any regularity on television or radio unless as the subjects of documentaries on impoverished aristocrats, secret fox hunts or elephant polo. The Queen herself no longer sounds as she did – compare last year’s Christmas speech to the one she made in 1957. Like priests abandoning Latin or pundits Sanskrit, what was once known as British “society” has, consciously or otherwise, rejected a form of pronunciation that was exclusive to them...
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