my own glaswegian accent is considered
amongst the least attractive in the uk
and i want to know why that is to find
out
i'm meeting professor jane stuart smith
who's been working at glasgow university
for the last 20 years
what have you found about glaswegian in
terms of how it's distinct from other
regional dialects what has happened
in english dialects is that there's been
the loss
of local dialect features whereas the
glasgow dialect
has become more distinct rather than
less distinct
what we are interested in when we talk
about phonetics
is how we produce speech accents are
produced with everybody that has
fundamentally a very similar vocal tract
so traditional glass region used to have
a very
retracted tongue root but the settings
the vocal tract have changed in glass
region
since the first world war so they they
were more or
oh and now they're more oh why glasgow
and and not like edinburgh for example
there's something special about the city
in the early 1900s glasgow was described
as
the largest village in the world these
close-knit networks
which are so important for language
linguistically you've got this really
really interesting situation
with the expression of identity it's one
way that people can fight back
because if they come from a deprived
area what can they do
oh it's good to know that that sense of
pride that glaswegians have is not
100 hubris jane has agreed to analyze
the first series i ever presented for
bbc scotland
my name is darren mcgarvey locate the
scottish rapper to some
and i want a male shoe in the world that
i grew up in
now i like this and i want a mere shoe
immers you
yeah but then you almost sound french
when you're trying to do that yes
because it's a uv lara
and would anybody say that saying in
french
is bad or slang or ugly
no no you have a uvular r
you produced it in the same way as a
french person but it's not associated
with loveliness
quite this is the important bit and you
really want people
to listen to you a world defined by
poverty
a world defined by poverty and this is
what you're doing with your language
but you kind of take people unawares
because you say community community
community
and then community where it's important
society society
responsibility so
whatever's happening in the planning of
your speech
you are aligning the
yeah the social cultural importance of
what you're saying to your audience
and it's getting the linguistic
repertoire
which is needed at the time yeah i
am often being told that
class is no longer a thing but
language more than any other area for me
is is where
it's most evident various pieces of
research like language attitudes
research
shows that as soon as we hear somebody
we make social judgments about them
and those social judgments have got
nothing to do with
actually what they're saying or how they
say it but rather
it's the connection between certain
speech styles
with particular stereotypes accentism
is like the last kind of prejudice
because people are still kind of allowed
to use
accent as a vehicle to make social
judgments about other people
it's because it's class and class has
fallen at the bottom
of the current hierarchy of concerns
well it's falling to the bottom because
everybody's pretending it's not there
but as an rp standard english speaker
i'm lucky
because literally studies have shown
that if i was to say something
in my accent people will believe it
whereas if you were to say exactly the
same thing in your accent
they wouldn't believe it and it's scary
but it's been
demonstrated again and again part of
being middle class
and being educated is the way you talk
you have to speak
properly and if you don't that's a
problem
so if you move socially you've got to do
something to your language
and if you're stuck socially it's like
it's almost like it's a kind of prison