To hate sounding a bit posh?

[zukman]

I’m from Scotland and live in an area with a mix of strong and not so strong accents.
I was brought up here but subsequently lived in London for a year and studied at university in Southern England; one thought of as very grand...

I went to the local comprehensive school, my mum is a teacher, my dad an accountant. My mum is from Glasgow and her family lived in a tenement block.

My father is from Edinburgh and went to a —great waste of money—boarding school.

People always ask if I am English. People ask if I am posh. It clouds people’s judgement of me, even in Northern England where dp is from, people think I sound posh !

Some can tell I’m scottish, others claim to have no idea. I hate sounding a bit posh, but it’s too late to change my accent now isn’t it?

And my family and friend saying I sound posh now because I say tooth rather than tuth like I used to in Wales as does everyone

I get this...I still live in S Wales but dh has a very well spoken English accent. I’m a natural mimic and dh’s accent has rubbed off on me a lot...so I now say ‘tooth’ rather than ‘tuth’ and so do the dc. And quite a few other English-isms.

My dad was always muttering about ‘those kids sounding bloody English’

derxa

Honestly? You sound a bit of a dick

Teehee

Everyone in the UK has trouble with this. It's because we use accents as a social marker. Other countries mostly don't do this.

In Italy, clothes are a social marker and accents are mainly regional. A posh Venetian sounds like a working-class Venetian and both sound completely different from a Roman or a Neapolitan. But in Italy, NEVER go out with less than your best clothes on because YOU WILL BE JUDGED.

So the same problem as you have, but based on clothes not accent.

@menztoray

With all due respect, Glasgow is well known for its tenements and it’s slum clearances of said tenements. Whilst there are nice tenements in Glasgow, thousands were demolished as they were unfit for habitation. So to say you grew up in a tenement in Glasgow is generally synonymous with poverty. Are you Glaswegian yourself?

I detest my Berkshire accent. I grew up in the home counties, went to a naice school and have been ridiculed my whole life. Don't get me wrong, I think it's one of the worst accents in Britain.

I miss my Welsh accent. I seem to pick up accents by osmosis, and I lived in rural Wales, speaking a lot of Welsh. I still come out with a lot of 'be there now', adding 'issit' to sentences and calling people 'butt' which goes down SO well in England... But I've picked up my old habits now.

My favourite Brit accents are Welsh, Scottish, Irish, west country, and various Yorks ones (particularly Sheffield). I won't list my utterly hated ones.

I'm really surprised that you'd say that as a New Yorker. My friend from Yonkers is very insecure about her accent and what she imagines it says about her.

First, when I mentioned regional accents not being correlated with social class I was referring to national regions, like someone with a southern accent vs. a New England accent.

I'm pretty close to Yonkers and it doesn't have a distinctive accent that I'm aware of. It is right next to the NYC borough of the Bronx, which does have a recognizable accent, so perhaps that's what she's self conscious about. There's a sizable middle class and upper middle class population in both the Bronx and Yonkers, so having an accent distinctive to those areas wouldn't automatically signal class. City Island, for example, is downright posh.

Top 10 Most Expensive Neighborhoods in the Bronx

Yonkers also has some lovely neighborhoods

Yonkers

So I'm not really clear on a) why she thinks there's a Yonkers accent, as opposed to a Bronx or generic NYC accent or b) why she feel self conscious about it.

I naturally have a very strong Ayrshire accent as most of my family are from farming/miner villages. I have had to dilute it down to be understood at work in Glasgow so I sound slightly posh and well spoken but if I gonna l to my home town I slip straight back and my Husband from just outside Glashow can’t even understand me and once asked for a dictionary.

Of course you can change your accent! I moved from NI to London many years ago and had to change my accent pretty damn quick as no-one could understand a word I said! Many years and moves later I still am recognisably Northern Irish (especially when I get pissed) but when I go back to NI I get accused of being posh! I've lived all over the place since, so can do pretty good accents from Ulster Scots to Australian, its a good party piece.

Accents are a weird thing. I have three and I don't realise when it switches a lot of the time. I am from a working class MW background, technically Greater Manchester but the local accent is much more Lancastrian and I can be very broad. I am a solicitor and have adopted a slightly more posh work voice and enunciate more properly than is natural. I have an every day voice with DH and friends etc which is quite broad and then the accent that comes out if I spend a lot of time with my family and end up sounding like Peter Kay etc.

Some people can change accents, others really struggle with it.
I do find it strange though if someone has been born and brought up in one place and yet has a difference accent to everyone else who was born and bred there. And I wonder when meeting them if it was deliberate, which often hints at underlying snobbery.

My husband sounds quite posh and nowhere near where we come from which makes us smile.

I, on the other hand sound dead common

Honestly? You sound a bit of a dick

How's them sheep, dexra?

Just keep saying posh over and over. That will dissuade them. Nothing wrong with speaking properly. I do wish the thebritosh wouldn’t cling on to your regional dialects accents the way you do. It makes life a struggle for forgeiners and only exacerbates your class problems.

@menztoray i had this (grew in Australia but had a neutral accent). I didn’t speak English until I went to school and most of my early exposure to English was through television/films where a lot of the accents were American/queens english. Over time the accent because a twang ofaustralian. Then I moved to Britain and now it’s bevone a twang of British. I’ve never had a full on accent though or sounded just like the people around me. I try my best to always speak clearly so that every can understand and I feel that’s more important than signalling that you come from a certain region at the expense of clarity.

I know where Yonkers is Miss; I'm from NJ.

'First, when I mentioned regional accents not being correlated with social class I was referring to national regions, like someone with a southern accent vs. a New England accent.' There is no specific regional accent that is tied to being working class; in the US and the UK people roughly associate a strong regional accent with being working class. Obviously not everyone in one region is x while everyone in another region is y, it's more about how strong your local accent is, no matter where it's from or whether it's urban or rural.

In How To Speak Midwestern Edward McLelland talks about students who lose their regional accent when away at university because it marks them out in various unattractive ways and they want to appear more neutral. He says the tv show Cops is an excellent place to hear vanishing accents, as the people who appear on it (eg police, suspects/criminals, witnesses) are more likely to stay in their hometown and keep their accent. (It's an excellent book if you're interested in accents and related social/cultural stuff.)

'So I'm not really clear on a) why she thinks there's a Yonkers accent, as opposed to a Bronx or generic NYC accent or b) why she feel self conscious about it.' I didn't say she thinks there's a Yonkers accent, I said she is from there and feels insecure about what her accent says about her. She sounds like a New Yorker and thinks it makes her sound uneducated.

To be clear I'm not saying that I believe a strong accent means that you are working class (or uneducated etc) and a more neutral accent means the opposite, I'm just saying that people in the US do make judgements and assumptions, about class among other things, based on accent.

Hubby is originally from Brighton but emigrated to Canada from Stafford. He actually has a unique talent for imitating various accents - and not just from the UK. Sometimes he puts on a very posh accent and I joke that we should get him a top hat, a cape, and a brass-topped cane, plus two little yappy dogs named Fifi and Foo-Foo. Hubby usually replies in his posh accent, "Oh, FiFi! Foo-Foo! Come to Daddykins!"

I'm Scottish but sound like I'm "straight outta Berkshire".

My mum is posh English - did finishing school in Switzerland type stuff. My dad is highlands but moved to London in the 70s and back then "foreign" accents weren't understood so he adopted an English accent.

I understand various Scots dialects which people are always surprised about. There used to be a fab function on the BBC website where you could listen to various dialects - Cromarty is fun!

I live just outside of Perth where tbh there are a lot of English-sounding accents so it's not wholly unusual.

I had an appointment at the hospital where they asked where I was born... um "downstairs mate"!

Life has taken me on some curious journies over the years. I've been told "I knew you were Welsh the minute you opened your mouth" - I went to uni in Wales and used to think Cerys from Catatonia sounded non-accented...

I've been told "you're definitely from Ipswich" - not entirely sure I've even ever been there.

I've been told I sound Scandinavian.

Anyway -for every dick Scotsman who gets his sporran in a twist - there's a call centre, policeman, etc. who'll bend over backwards for you.

Speaking of curious life twists - found myself signing on in Parkhead. Oh the staff couldn't do enough for me the second I opened my mouth. It was horrible really - they were literally fawning over me and I am no better than any other poor bugger who finds themselves with a shitty stick in Easterhouse!

Mymum grew up in a working class rural area - only one of many siblings to go to grammar school where they made her speak posh! She sounds nothing like her siblings. I sound like her - and again nothing like the area I grew up in (although we moved around a lot). I get you OP . I have never felt I belonged and no, I can't change my accent, not everyone can. I now live abroad so ironically it doesn't matter so much!

I get this too. I'm Welsh, speak it and everything and am always asked if I'm English! Ironically all my English friends say I sound really Welsh, can't win. I usually say it's newsreader Welsh

This is partly the SNP influence imv. Our SMPs all talke with a pseudo Glasgow accent. All our bluddy signs are in Gaelic, including police cars, so every SMP despite having a lilting Highland accent or a nice musical Doric accent from the NE all have to sound as if they spent time in Barlinnie. Bluddy annoying. Nothing against Glasgow but Glasgow isn't Scotland.

Where do you live OP? I went to a council school in Edinburgh so no refined accent for me....until I moved overseas and nobody had a clue what I was saying...it was so hard! I had to change my accent to help others understand me and years later when I moved back home with my mid-Atlantic accent I got dogs abuse...you can’t win but it never really bothered me.

I’ve settled into a slightly more refined Edinburgh accent now and my pronunciation is much clearer than my school days (I still spend a lot of my time speaking to people overseas) I can also turn it up or down depending on who I am speaking to which is very useful as I work in an environment with lots of very posh accents! I can definitely see the benefits of a ‘posher’ accent and I do find that people treat me differently depending on how I talk.

Embrace it OP! Nothing to be embarrassed about having a nice accent.

I'm Scottish, but am well spoken. I don't care if it makes me sound posh. At home, I wasn't allowed to speak Doric, because as my DM rightly pointed out, I didn't know where I was going to end up in life and being able to speak clearly was far more beneficial to me than speaking Doric. As it happened, I ended up in the Borders, where the local slang was completely different and the accent (to my ears) is ghastly. When I go back to Aberdeenshire to visit the relatives, I slide back towards the Aberdeenshire accent, but I can make myself understood easily wherever I go in the English speaking world and if that means people think I'm posh, so what? I don't care.

I don't have this problem, I'm from North Yorkshire and sound as Yorkshire as they come, might as well stick on a flat cap and shout 'eeee bah gum!' 😂

Just own it

I get posh accusations

I have a scandi accent but it gets mistaken for posh

Never apologise for it, is my advice. Just own it.