I’m training my daughter to have a posh accent – I’m so ashamed

According to a team from the University of Essex, children think that “posh” accents are an indicator of intelligence. The team recruited 27 five-year-olds and then played them three accents: Standard Southern British English (SSBE) – a contemporary version of Received Pronunciation – Yorkshire and Essex.In a very science-fiction-sounding next step, the linguistics experts collated the children’s brain activity using electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, as well as measuring the speed of their answers to indicate how embedded their attitudes towards accents were.

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addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }Their findings were pretty unilateral – across all measures the children associated someone with the SSBE accent, typically described as middle class, as being clever, while they linked the Yorkshire accent to a lack of intelligence.Now I, like any sensible person, read this and think that it’s all rather sad. I am entirely aware that a person’s accent has no bearing on how clever they are.

And as a fairly right-on sort, I don’t like the idea of a regional accent being any kind of stigma. And yet despite all of that, I have a confession to make. I am actively raising my three-year-old to have my accent, rather than my partner’s.

My other half was born and raised in Yorkshire and has a very nice (to my mind, rather sexy) Yorkshire accent – the exact accent that the children in the University of Essex study associated with lesser intelligence. Now I should state for the record that I like the Yorkshire accent very much. And, rather problematically, the policy in our household is that my daughter, and any future children, are intended to sound like me, not him.

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addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }This isn’t just my policy – not by a long shot. I noticed a year or so ago that my partner had taken to saying bath, grass and dance with a long A sound, rather than a short one, as is natural to him, without me saying anything because he wants her to have my “posh” accent. This is a man who loves Yorkshire with his whole heart, who shouts “that’s Leeds!” whenever he sees even a brief clip of his hometown on television, a man who literally used to present regional Yorkshire television, turning his back on his natural accent in favour of my Margot from The Good Life tones.

But when questioned on why he was doing this he told me that he thought it would be “better” if my daughter sounded more like me – AKA – posh. And while I professed not to agree, deep down I sort of feel he’s got a point. Terrible, right? In my defence, none of us feel very good about the fact that we’ve slipped into running a toddler elocution academy.

But the truth is, we both know the privilege that comes from sounding like I do. He’s softened his original accent into a sort of BBC Yorkshire burr to avoid the constant “Ey Up Chuck” microaggressions that Londoners seem to think funny – because the sad truth is that sounding posh often makes your life easier. Softening your accent comes with a stigma of its own, of course.

In 2020 when Jodie Comer gave an interview in a slightly less Scouse accent than she’d previously had – presumably so that the American contingent could more easily understand her, or perhaps just from spending lots of time in London – there was outrage. Think pieces appeared left, right and centre about what it meant, whether she was being pragmatic or betraying her roots. #color-context-related-article-3536210 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square CHARLENE WHITE Changing my accent helped me into my career - but now I've reclaimed itRead MoreIt’s a bit of a vicious circle, I suppose.

The Jodie Comers of the world have every right to change their accent, consciously or otherwise, just as my partner has every right to raise his London-based kids to sound like Prince George. But the more we assimilate our accents, the more we perpetuate the idea that cleverness and poshness are mutually inclusive, and on and on the same problem goes. And yet, I can’t quite bring myself not to care – or to stop correcting my daughter when she says “wartah” rather than “water”, because however wrong accent privilege is, I can’t help wanting her to have it.

My upper-middle-class tones give me the same sort of vocal privilege that Boris Johnson and the like benefit from – even if we’re talking nonsense, people hear the poshness and think I’m making some kind of point.if(window.adverts) { window.

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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }I get consistently better treatment when I’m booking a table or negotiating with a customer service provider. I would even argue that I’m taken more seriously by medical professionals when I’m advocating for myself in a hospital setting.

I can’t afford to give my daughter many of the staggering privileges that I grew up with. Private education is firmly off the table, and I doubt that she’ll be riding a pony more than once a year or having extra French tuition before her Latin classes. But the one thing I can make sure she has is my advantageous accent – however problematic that might be.

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