Melvyn Bragg says his Northern accent was beaten out of him at grammar school in order that he “talk proper.”
What did he sound like before?
The television presenter, who has celebrated the richness and diversity of the English language in a series of books, said he grew up in the 1950s effectively speaking two languages – standard English and his local Cumbrian dialect.
“When you went to grammar school, they were determined to beat that out of you. So you didn’t talk like that anymore; you talked proper,” Bragg told the BBC’s This Cultural Life.
“We kept it subversive between ourselves,” he added.
Oh. So standard code switching then. Sigh.
“Help, I’m a victim!” – Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, CH, HonFRS, FRSL, FBA
and quite a few do this all by themselves with no beating. Louis CK said he didn’t like his broad boston accent so he just stopped speaking like that and talked american RP.
talked proper or talked properly?
Seems our foppish national treasure still doesn’t understand grammar which is surely a drawback for a novelist
At the age of 11, speaking Derbyshire, I went to a boarding school in Sussex where the accents of were predominantly Londonese. With no bullying, no pressure from staff my accent quickly changed to unidentifiable RP. Though I still have 75 years later the odd problem with the letter u in butter.
Curiously in my late 20s, because of a certain precision in my speech, I was asked more than once if I was a Colonial.
I new a guy who grew up in East Yorkshire and then went to live in Scotland. He occasionally came home to visit and, in a surprisingly short time he had acquired a Scottish accent.
That’s weird. It was never “beaten out of“ me. Nobody even told us. We just knew that school was for learning and study, so you talked properly. I mean, it was hardly RP, but it was (and remains, I hope) a clear and widely-comprehensible middle-class West-of-Scotland. Maybe it’s an independent school thing. I had classmates (and teachers) from all over the world, let alone this city or country, so it was kind of necessary if you were to be understood.
Stonyground: I bet everyone up here thought he still had his Yorkshire accent. People’s ear for accents is very finely-tuned. It doesn’t take much to “lose” one.
When I was at home in Yorkshire I was told I had no accent. When I was at university in Scotland I was told I had a Yorkshire accent. Glod knows what people think when I speak Japanese, which I learned in Scotland.
Sam Duncan” so it was kind of necessary if you were to be understood”
-reminded me of and doing signals competitions at school in kent. Points were awarded for exchanging QSLcards and cyphering/decyphering specific messages. Bonus Points for distance. We did very well mainly off the back of a connection with Dollar Academy in the highlands somewhere. Absolutely the best elocuters on the net. We had more trouble with schools 20 miles away.
Accents are pretty easy to pick up, and can be stealthy.
I was pleasantly surprised that a lovely scottish lady, a neighbour stallholder at one of my events, could pick out where I’ve been hanging out in the UK in the past. Pretty accurate as well.
Or as she summarised it “There’s sadly no scots in there, but at least there isn’t any BBC Piss.”
Perhaps they just beat him becaus he was an annoying twat.
Is Melvyn Bragg really from Cumbria? I don’t think he’s ever mentioned it before.
And in other news Guardian columnist complains of lack of social mobility.
Seriously though, if you want to get on in life you have to make an effort. I sometimes wonder if the middle class telling lower classes it’s ok to act slovenly, not get married, have visible body piercing and talk unintelligibly is a way of pulling up the ladder. See also killing off grammar schools.
One of my best mates at school was, like me, brought up from an early age in Somerset. His parents were from the West of Scotland. Both he, and his sister, would start speaking with their parents’ accent as soon as they crossed the threshold at home.
Interesting thing about “BBC English”: it’s not RP. Reith thought it should be “placeless” and comprehensible to everyone, so the Corporation (possibly still the Company at the time) created an entirely artificial accent which can best be described as similar to RP, with the principal difference being that it’s rhotic: you roll your “R”s.
Announcers found it extremely difficult to stick to (you tend to fall either into standard RP or a sort of comedy Scottish), and it fell completely out of favour during the war when it was considered more important for listeners to be able to recognise the individual announcers’ voices, accent and all.
I moved away from Bristol in 1966.
No one ever mentioned my accent until a couple of months ago when I met an old lady who recognised it immediately.
I never thought I had an accent at all but now I notice it in some of my vowel sounds in words like ‘town’ and ‘mound’.
I worked with a guy who had a ‘proper’ Bristol accent, which places an unwritten ‘L’ on the end of words ending in a vowel sound. So, in meetings, he’d ask about the ‘agendal’. I believe Bristol itself was originally Bricstow.
Obviously, when he went to grammar school his adenoids weren’t fully grown, so perhaps he was still comprehensible for a couple of years. Getting beaten up had nothing to do with his voice, more his imagination.
@Hallowed be
Ah no. Dollar isn’t in the Highlands, it’s just east of Stirling. Clear enough accent though.
I am told at home that I sound posh and accentless.
When I lived in Scotland, apparently I was very Yorkshire.
My Russian is apparently accentless – but then regional accents of Russian were pretty much stamped out by the Soviets so it doesn’t matter so much where you learn.
“regional accents of Russian were pretty much stamped out by the Soviets”
Err, yes, “malako” is Moscow, “moloka” is Volga. And someone once knew that I’d learned my (limited) Russian in Moscow in two words. “Govarit Russki” “Chut, chut”. Pronouncing the “t”s there was the giveaway.
I’m 10 years younger than Mr Bragg, I attended the same school, Nelson Thomlinson Grammar School in Wigton. I would have started there about 5 years after he left so if he’s telling the truth the culture of that school must have changed enormously over those intervening years because to the best of my recollection, none of us were even encouraged to change our accents.
But that reminds me: one of the nuns at my infant school in Burnley gave us elocution lessons. We all tried hard but she didn’t change our flat Northern vowels one iota.
I knew a student who talked normally nearly all the time, but could switch on a strong Welsh accent at will.
The problem was, she couldn’t switch it off at will. Once she started, she was stuck with it till she went to bed.
The next morning, she would wake up talking completely normally.