People from Glasgow and Birmingham are wrongly judged to be less intelligent and capable because of their accents, researchers have found.
We really do need to have a word with the Telegraph about their subeditors. What is that \”wrongly\” doing in there?
Oh the Brummie accent is gorgeous. Who could judge that one negatively?
If the majority find you largely unintelligible, then unsurprisingly that majority will deem you thick.
‘Wrongly’ is the gentle nod to political correctness.
Perhaps they meant there are better reasons than their accents to consider them thickos….
Yeeoow can fook off
I learned not to speak oik a farrrmer and people treat me with more respect. I cannot understand why people stick to their thick accents and expect people to even understand them let alone assume they are intelligent.
Can’t agree – love Geordie accents, hate Brummie accents, but don’t gauge intelligence on either.
I think you’ll all find that it’s the black country accent that people hate. My softer brummie accent seems to be gaining in popularity these days. I even bring it back on purpose sometimes.
Whereas it’s cockneys and scousers whom we assume to be crooks. Innit?
Q: what’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison?
Brummie: a buffalo is a type of animal and a bison is something to wash your hands in.
You know what? When I was young the response “step outside and say that” had a significantly civilising effect on conversation.
For the information of pedants, it was the ability to say “step outside and say that” that was important. You didn’t need to be able to beat the other guy into pulp, just to make him regret his behaviour before you fell down; so he didn’t act in a way to provoke a challenge.
Well, I do hope that the authors drew their conclusions after watching Niall Ferguson’s TV series, rather than before.
I work with a lot of people with limited or heavily accented English, and I’ve got used to it over the years. Chinese/Indian/French/various other SE Asian/European (east and west). No problem with any of those. Australia’s like that, we all get by somehow.
But I still can’t understand a fookin’ word a Glaswegian says. I’m sure they’re no less intelligent but – how would I know?
I have lived forty miles from Newcastle for all of my fifty-some years, and I cannot understand most Geordies at all.
Accents say more about class and education than intelligence. Although class and education say a lot about education.
I would guess what they have discovered is that nice, well educated, middle class boys don’t speak with regional accents. And that these particular regional accents differ significantly from RP so that the difference is notable. Thus people too thick to have benefited from the expansion of education still speak Brummie.
The question could surely be tested by checking what people think of other people who speak with, say, Scottish accents. Given the up-to-recently excellence of the Scottish education system. But we don’t have to ask that do we? All this is is proof of the failure of the British State School system.