why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit
This is something I’ve been dying to talk about.
There’s something called culture. People (especially USAmericans) think of culture as cultural dress, cultural food, cultural music. These are culture, but they are only the very superficial aspects of it. Like the icing on your cake. Far more deep rooted is the more meaty bits of culture: the attitudes, the ideas, the taboos.
There’s a guy on tiktok who has done a series that shows this very well, of Germans Vs Irish. In one video the German offers the Irish person two kinds of tea, green or black. The Irish person keeps putting off the choice with things like “Oh sure whatever is easiest”, “Which have you more of?” and, “Ah sure I don’t want to cause a fuss” whereas the German just wants a straight answer. This is a cultural difference of politeness.
Here in the UK, accents mark your class very openly. They let everyone know where you’re from (though this has become less pronounced in the last 50 years,) and what your background is. A lot of people (especially northerners, but also a fair contingent of working class southerners) face discrimination on the basis of their accents.
Some of us (myself included) even change register (though I believe USAmericans call it code switching) in and out of our regional accent and a close approximation of RP. We learn to do it because it makes us seem more intelligent (even though it shouldn’t) and helps us be taken more seriously.
Thus, our country carries a lot of baggage when it comes to accents. Especially those of the working class who have had their accents made fun of, or have faced discrimination based on it.
So when someone outside the country (usually USAmericans) makes fun of our accents they’re stepping on a lot of cultural taboos and boundaries. Especially because the “It’s Chewsday, gonnae wot-ch sum yewchube innit” is a working class accent.
Now, that’s not to say we can’t take a joke, but this is the kind of joke you share with someone who you have been friends with for a while. My boyfriend often will pick up on the way I say certain words, in much the same fashion I pick up on his idiosyncrasies of speech (English isn’t his first language so he says stuff like close the lights, which is adorable.) If we aren’t predisposed to liking you, then the joke you’re trying to make is more like an insult.
The way I like to think of it is if you were in a pub, and made those sorts of jokes to someone. If they knew you, and they liked you, they’d probably laugh along. If they didn’t like you or know you, they would punch you in the jaw.
HOWEVER: I recognise this post as a joke. I don’t personally find these jokes offensive, but then no one really makes fun of me or considers me stupid because of my accent.
Oh that actually makes a lot of sense! It’s like how it’s assumed in media that the southeastern Appalachian (‘hick’ or ‘redneck’) accent is audible shorthand for ‘this American character is stupid.’ That sentiment reinforces negative stereotypes about that region which has historically been home to a large working class population that has suffered from an underfunded education system and other systematic abuses. It is ultimately an underhanded joke, but not everyone from America (or even the region necessarily) considers it to be offensive despite its classist nature.
yes, that’s basically it! it grinds my gears when certain Very Online Americans will quite rightly say that europeans have no right to mock the us’ lack of healthcare/gun control and working-class accents…but then turn around and act like working-class british accents and foods are hilarious and should be mocked ‘bc of colonialism and the bp oil spill’ as though all british people are directly responsible for the oil spill. and then some of them conveniently forget that there are in fact british people of colour - in the wake of brexit, a smug american blog defended saying that british people upset by the referendum were getting ‘karma’ for the british empire, even when british poc pointed out that they were the ones most likely to be negatively affected by brexit, by saying ‘obviously i don’t mean you’, to which said british poc responded ‘THEN WHY DID YOU SAY BRITISH PEOPLE’
The hatred, by the privileged of England, towards Scotland and any Scottish accent was so pervasive that my mother wouldn’t let my brother and I develop a Scottish accent. She was born in Jamaica but her family moved to London when she was 11. She moved to Scotland when she was pregnant with me. Both my brother and I were born in Scotland and spent out entire childhood there. Mum was adamant that neither of us would have the local accent. It was “common” and “low class” and “would hinder us in the future”. She used to fine us half our pocket money if we used any Scottish slang or said anything in a Scottish accent. I got bullied at school for having a “posh English accent” but she thought my job prospects were more important than a modicum of happiness at school. My outsider status was doubled by that. I was brown and “English”.
Even now, after decades in Scotland, I still don’t sound Scottish. The English hear a slight lilt but that disappears as soon as I spend any time with them.
I feel alienated on two fronts now, skin colour and accent. And one of those was avoidable if it hadn’t been for the prejudice against against perceived lower class accents. Even in Jamaica Mum learnt to speak in an English accent like the white girls at her school. She could switch between the two. Jamaican with her parents, posh English everywhere else. Why couldn’t I have had that?
The fact that a lot of regional actors are expected to code-switch their accent patterns the a kind of neutral English accent in Britain shows how pervasive the classism is.
When Christopher Eccleston was cast as the Doctor in Doctor Who, people were surprised that he used his own northern accent, instead of performing with an accent like every Doctor before him. That was only 15-ish years ago.
Even now, this still happens - James McAvoy made a very vocal protest a couple of years back about a critic who complained about the use of Scots accents and only applauded the “plummy English” accent of one character in a play.
Regional and working class accents were used as joke accents for decades in British media. Look up old broadcasts and notice how many people only speak RP English (ie. the formal pronunciation that smacks of elocution lessons and enunciation). As media accessibility and productions expanded, there have been more regional accents showing up, but it’s still a big problem.
Putsimply when you mock “innit” you’re mocking poor people and often people of colour. Boris Johnson doesn’t say “innit bruv”.
RP and attempts at RP are not a neutral accent, they’re an approximation of poshness. It’s SEEN as a neutral accent, but I just want to point out it very much isn’t.
I lost my accent (English is my third language) after an incident where some people clocked I was foreign and didn’t have any ties to the community the council had dumped me and my then-baby into, and decided it would be funny to try and bash my door down and scream threats through the letterflap. It’s really fucked up because I have lost part of my cultural identity to prevent myself from facing violence.
British accents, from the point of view of a foreigner who lives here, are incredibly complex.
On the topic of food, I saw a post once trying to argue that the ‘full English’ breakfast is Actually Posh Because Origins (and also that it was gross and inedible because ‘all British food sucks amirite’). And I just. Ways to prove you’ve never spent any time in Britain and don’t know shit about our culture!
The idea of a cooked breakfast centred around sausage, eggs, bacon, and some kind of bread, with or without various other elements depending on taste, availability, and region? It’s one you find everywhere in Britain, not just England, and in Ireland for that matter. And it is not a ‘posh thing’-it is universal across class lines too! If anything it is predominantly associated with the working class, especially with caffs that sell cheap, calorie-high hot food to people who are going to need the energy it affords them and probably don’t have the time or energy to make themselves a hot meal first thing in the morning. More upscale places will do versions with higher-quality and more expensive ingredients because what do you expect, that’s how rich people work whereever you are! It doesn’t mean the whole concept of the meal is snobbish!
I just. I am so fucking done with Americans on tumblr shitting on totally neutral bits of my country’s culture-or, often, on bits of Scottish or Welsh or Irish culture, because lbr most of them don’t even understand the difference, let alone know or care about the shit those countries have suffered at English hands-and thinking they’re striking some kind of blow against imperialism. The posh fucks like the royal family or Boris Johnson aren’t going to notice and if they did they wouldn’t care. The people you are hurting are working class people, people of colour, people who don’t fit under the PoC umbrella but nevertheless have been discriminated against violently because guess what racism doesn’t work by the exact same rules in non-American places, disabled people, queer people. People who are stuck dealing with bullshit from the bastards in power while we just try to live our lives. Because you’re proving that you don’t know shit about how anything goes over here, and you don’t want to. You just want to mock people for not being you, and then justify it by invoking imperialism as a reason why you don’t need to feel bad about it.
