What is in an accent?

Freerange eggs has a class aspects right.

freerange
you are so right.
the accent does not define the person, merely where they went to primary school.
the diction and grammar define the class - and THEY are worth the effort.

my children get leeway for sounding more Hampshire than I do
but bugger all wiggle room for slurring and blech.

"Accents are fine, poor spoken grammar is awful and unfortunately for some regional dialects the two go together."

Absolute nonsense, sorry. By definition a dialect contains non-standard grammar. That doesn't mean it's ungrammatical - just that its grammar doesn't match with that of Standard English. And it doesn't mean that speakers who use non-standard grammars are incapable of switching to a more standard form when the need arises.

Look at me, for example. I'm Glaswegian and I say 'yous' as a plural of 'you'. Of course the plural 'you' doesn't exist in Standard English, but try telling the French that it's ungrammatical to have such a form. In fact, the Glaswegian version is more expressive because I can express a meaning that yous can't. :P

In fact attitudes to language are closely tied to wealth. Glaswegian accents are considered undesirable because they are associated with deprivation - the same is true of the Liverpudlian accent. However, the Liverpudlian accent was considered desirable a few hundred years ago when Liverpool was very prosperous. The Irish accent was also considered undesirable in recent years until Ireland began to prosper.

This isn't just anecdotal - it's borne out by lots of research. Judging a person based on their accent is a very sneaky form of classism. No better than judging a person by the colour of their skin.

There are some accents I can't stand (brummie).

Accents are fine, poor spoken grammar is awful and unfortunately for some regional dialects the two go together.

Can't see how Surrey could offend anyone though

When I first started work I soon learned to make full use of the stereotypes associated with my accent, honest, blunt, no nonsense etc. It is the accent favoured by financial services companies for adverts , and call centres. Sadly over time my baths and castles turned into barths and carstles. I kept it going long enough to have little DDs that said bath and castle but they soon lost it come Nursery and then I couldn't keep it up in the face of their accents.

Then we moved abroad and they developed the most extraordinary expat brat third country kid accent, a sort of aussie / brit / US hybrid.

That's gone now too

What talkinpeace said.

What is an accent?
It is a way of pronouncing your words differently from the person you are addressing such that they notice.
If you have the same accent, neither person will notice.
And accents have NOTHING to do with diction.
I can cope with almost all accents but poor diction drives me UP THE WALL

Accents only matter if they are so strong that other people can't understand you. If you can't moderate your accent enough to communicate, then people are likely to assume you are thick or at least uneducated, just because it shows you've probably not had to talk to a wide variety of people in your life.

I don't get your comment about sending your daughter to a Surrey school to get a posh acent though, then saying you don't think accents matter. If you were thinking about that when you chose a school, then I think you must value posh accents, else it wouldn't even occur to you to think about it when choosing between schools.

Accents only matter if they impede communication.

But it's no accident that advertisers choose particular accents to create a specific effect (gentle Geordie, or Tennant Scots being popular; and some eg Wolverhampton never being selected). It's the sort of unconscious reaction that study after study shows that we all have. if you recognise that the phenomenon exists, it becomes possible to look beyond it to the person themselves.

You sent your daughter to Surrey to get a posh accent but accents don't matter? Eh?
I'm afraid some people will still judge you by how you speak. It is also vital to learn to adapt your speech to suit purpose and audience. (I use dialect words when chatting casually but not in a formal situation with someone who wasn't local and wouldn't understand me!) I do love hearing different accents though and wish more presenters on TV had a less RP way of speaking.

I dont think accents matter that much as long as they are your accent ie I hate it when people change their accent to fit in/make a statement if that makes sense. I personally love regional accents.
I dont think I speak with a posh accent I think I speak like everyone else but I know other disagree! The only thing I've found is as someone who works with people from all backgrounds it can initially put people off but not for long people often say "I thought you were going to be one of the snobby posh people when I first met you but you're really quite normal!"