Keep being called posh at work

[Consciousuncouplings]

I've lived on and off in Manchester for a lot of my life but spent around 10 years of my childhood 20 miles away. I've been back in Manchester now for around 5 years, I don't really have the accent, it's quite a neutral one and it's hard to pinpoint exactly where from I think.
I work for a place in Manchester where a lot of the colleagues are from around that area or live close by, most have quite a broad accent.

I've been referred to as posh by them a few times, one the other day commented on 'my accent.'

I once said something and one said 'Oh I thought you'd be too posh to say that."

They're acting as though I speak like the Royal Family, far from it! I'm not posh in the slightest, and my accent is just very neutral, I spent some childhood in a market town about 20 miles away like I say.

I don't know why it bothers me really, but some people seem to associate you with thinking you're above others, snobby and so on and I'm none of those.
When they say it I just say 'no I'm not.'
Does anyone else get things like this and how do you deal with it?

I guess they just don't understand code switching. It's pretty normal to talk differently at work than you would do at home, it's not as though any of us has one defined accent which is fixed at birth and will never ever be influenced by anyone else. You could be unconciously emphasising the differences in your accent from theirs to assert your own identity, or you could be unconciously trying to fit in by imitating speech patterns. Neither is right or wrong or any kind of class marker. We all talk differently all the time.

I hve a parent who comes from an English speaking country different to the one I mainly grew up in. So as a consequence I have a vocabulary that doesn't match my accent. If people comment on it, I just assume they don't get how language acquisition and accent work.

I get the same. Definitely not posh in the slightest (large family, lived on a council estate, dad unemployed for a good chunk of my childhood) but because my outlet was voracious book-reading, I have a decent vocabulary and a fairly neutral accent. I tend to either ignore the posh comments, or say "oh do fack orf" in my best cut-glass accent 😁

I had this from wife of a friend where DH grew up - an area rife with inverse snobbery.

I grew up in another part of the midlands slightly further south and live in north and very south of England for years by then- though I suspect my accent my have more to do with me being ND and years of speech therapy I had as a child.
One time I'd finally had enough of her digs and said well my DGP were born into
poverty and worked their entire lives to better themselves and my Dad worked in a factory and Mum a supermarket checkout - so me sounding posh is a surprise and probably a good thing - wasn't your dad a bank manager- pause - she never mentioned my accent again.

Same with my education - she'd just dismissed my dyslexia diagnosis as not proper dyslexia and then said she could have gone to university of she wanted - and I smiled and said well I actually went and actually got a good degree and then a masters and despite cost it had got me a good job and had been worth it- and had she thought of the OU and other forms of education out there.
It was never mentioned again - even stopped her digs about DH education.
Other people comment on my accent - now it's English in Wales - and mean nothing by it but this woman it was put down and digs with a smile that many other in room didn't hear - she stopped as soon as I started smiling and doing same back.

So a PA response back may help stop it - though I suspect it depends how widespread the comments are and how many involved.

I really wouldn't let it bother you @Consciousuncouplings unless you think it's meant maliciously and that doesn't seem to be the case? It's semi-banter and they'll move on to other things once the novelty of you having a different accent to them wears off.

I'm originally from Lancashire (not Wigan!! for the benefit of the great diagram from @VoluptuaSneezelips ) but my mother was a teacher and insisted I try to speak properly e.g. I got told off for saying "int it" rather than "isn't it" etc. So my accent was/is milder rather than broad Lancastrian. I went to uni in the South-East where I was considered very Northern 😂Since then I've lived overseas, and now in London for longer than I was in Lancashire so my accent is fairly neutral and people can't really place where I'm from. Although my Northern origins are obvious if you're paying attention when I say bath, glass, class etc. Or when I speak to other Northerners, my accent gets stronger (to Southern ears at least!).

I often get called posh when I go back to Lancashire. Doesn't bother me. I also get the "you're not from round here, are you?!" This was last said to me by someone at Christmas - the next door neighbours to the AirBNB I was staying in who proudly told out that they'd lived there for 20 years from when the house was first built when they moved into the area. I couldn't resist telling them that I used to ride my pony across the fields that their house is built on and asking if they knew any of my mother's family (who have lived in the village going back at least as far as the 17th century). 😜They didn't mean any harm. They just thought I was some jumped up tosser from London in a fancy car with a (to their ears) posh accent.

I'm from down south and I've lived up north twice in my life, once as a child and then again as an adult.

Most people either assumed we were "posh" or "Cockney" (I'm neither. I'm actually from a Traveller family, spent part of my childhood living on a council estate, we've never been well off. I'd say my accent is a mix of generic Southern English with hints of rural East Anglian).

The Cockney thing I just found amusing because 1. it's easily disputed - I'm not from anywhere near London, and 2. I just think the difference between a Cockney accent and my own is so big that it's quite funny. To me it'd be like someone getting a Leeds accent confused with a Liverpool one.

But the "posh" one really grates, for several reasons. Like you said, it nearly always comes with unpleasant undertones of "you think you're better than us", "you've obviously had a more privileged life than us", etc. and it's much harder to refute those things without getting personal.

I also think (and I have had Northern friends confirm this) that there is a misconception in the North that everyone down south is posh and rich and that we don't have poverty. I think this misconception partly comes from the fact that, apart from London and Bristol, the aren't really any proper large cities in the South, and in rural areas and smaller towns there is much less physical separation between rich and poor people, they live alongside each other much more, which makes the poverty less visible.

Oh gosh OP. I have exactly the same issue although I am originally from Yorkshire. Now I just laugh it off but originally it was used against me in some sort of bullying campaign when I first started work some 30 years ago. I was the female and had a degree which didn't go down well. They started spreading a rumour that I thought I was better than everyone else and to 'prove' their point claimed that I'd had elocution lessons to get rid of my Yorkshire accent. (Obviously not true). It was an awful time.

Now I tend to just laugh and brush it off.

In Manchester too! It may just be a Manc thing. Oddly my best friend lives down south and was describing me to a friend of hers saying I had a strong northern accent so it's all relative.

ANnother good response to being told You don't sound like you're from the North is to say We're not all Rob Roys, as per the Blood Donor.

I was brought up in England and most people think my accent is completely neutral English.
I have had comments like,

My parents, with strong accents from another part of the UK were "clearly 'very' working class - so if I had a 'real' English accent it 'should' be Cockney. (?)
or A manager who told me she'd left a message with my cleaner/housekeeper ( My mum!). even though she knew very well where my parents were from.

My response has always been to laugh it off - it's 2023 not Victorian England - or reply in a loud and strong Dick Van Dyke Mary Poppins accent.

I think if it wasn't a person's accent, these kinds of people would find some other feature to criticise because it's how they operate. However, I'm sure others have had a lot worse comments than I had.

This sounds really annoying @Consciousuncouplings . I think I'd be inclined to go for bemusement each time, perhaps ask "what makes you say that?" and then follow up with "well, you don't know me very well" like it's a failing on their part.

I grew up on a council estate in the SE and moved to Manchester about 15 years ago.

Everyone assumes I’m posh from my accent but I just say ‘I’m not posh I’m just southern’ and laugh.

Both my children have Mancunian accents despite only one of them being born here - their dad is originally from the West Country and has a proper ‘ooo arrrr’ farmers accent (like The Wurzels!) which really illustrates the influence of peers/school mates & geographical location on accents and dialects.

I’m keen to keep my accent as it makes me feel connected to my late parents and the town where I grew up (and got priced out of long ago! Even the ex council houses identical to the one my parents rented sell for over half a million).

If I were actually posh, I probably would never have moved to Manchester! I do love my little bit of it now though.

Here’s The Wurzels covering Oasis, for the West Country/MCR connection!

One of my friends had this. Her colleagues were saying things like "oh you're so posh" (she isn't) to undermine her. She turned round to them one day and went "well you're so common".

They never said anything to her again.

I wouldn't recommend it 🤣 but it did solve her issue

I grew up near Rochdale and my mum was from scotland but had moved to London in her teens and developed a very neutral accent which I seemed to pick up from her. When I went to school I was always called posh and new teacher would ask if I grew up somewhere else. My sisters were both very broad in their accents so maybe that highlighted it but tbh my accent is clearly still very northern just not quite as extreme as some others

This all sounds truly exhausting and juvenile. You can go 5 miles and hear 5 accents and everyone still wants to point them out? Especially the posh nicknames (Queen Anne, Portia) - how creative. Eyeroll. I can see why everyone is fed up.

Do you get upset when foreigners comment on different accents though?

Per @KillingLoneliness "E.g I’ve never dropped my Ts and I don’t use an F sound to replace TH." THIS is the only thing that sounds rough or common to foreigners, I would think. We don't have the other assumptions about accents. The underlying class means nothing--it's just sounds.

but because a lot of Scottish people have English-shaped chips on their shoulders for some reason English = posh

Aye. So we do. (Must be seeing all the posh English folk on Coronation St and Eastenders)

I’m Glaswegian and have lived in Scotland and England. Banter is no problem. My accent is always commented on in England - but only knobs that put on the ridiculous ‘Och aye the noo’ ‘accent’ mildly annoy me as it’s just so unoriginal and banal. I do find saying ‘just checking - are you trying to take the piss or auditioning for something’ usually stops them dead - but I do say it in my unmodified version of my accent. Good fun and they never do it again.

In general, I’d say the Scottish accent is liked in England, as are the Welsh and Irish accents. I believe the refined Edinburgh accent (Miss Jean Brodie) was voted ‘most trustworthy’ in the U.K. It was the one people most trusted when they heard it spoken by the pilot of their plane - or something like that.

My mum grew up a cockney proper east end within bow bell etc actually slum cleared out to Harlow so as working class as you can be really yet when she moved to the north west 20 years or so ago she was very upset at being called posh by her collegues who were infact much posher than she was. I picked up some southern bits to my accent as well and got called posh for them although my accent is noting of the sort

like I may say gr-arse not gras but I say
warta for water and drop every “h” there is (other than when saying the letter “h” of course)

some northerners seem to think every southern accent is a posh one!

Born in Sussex,used to be told at work: I talked posh, spoke beautifully, just because I sound end letters, don't say, ain't, nothing or something ending with a K or couldn't of,instead of have.Was told in my last job, I was a walking dictionary. My late DM said swearing shows you have a poor command of the English language. I never felt insulted. They sounded quite envious. Very ordinary council house, upbringing,but nice (posh) village!

I remember watching a programme about female police officers and one was based at a Yorkshire police station. She was from down South and had a southern accent (not a posh one) she said they were always making fun of her accent but she couldn't help where she was from. It's annoying as it others people and makes them feel excluded.

I love meeting others who say long words slightly incorrectly, because I know they are likely working class kids who spent their formative years reading enormous volumes of books in the warm, free, library, (like me) and thus absorbed their vocabulary through the printed page, never once hearing these words spoken aloud.

I was once mocked by a proper posh kid because I didn’t put the emphasis in the right place when reading the word ‘cadaver’ (I said kadduverr, rather than kaDAVurr).

I like to imagine I told him to cock right off or risk me Nan coming up to shove HIM in a body bag (my Nan was terrifying!) but I probably just sat there silent and hot-faced with embarrassment.

I’d happily tell him to cock off nowadays.

That's right. In my long experience at work, anyone who poked me got poked right back in their tender place.

I live in Devon, I don't have a strong accent but there is a definite westcountry lilt. I've had work colleagues from Dorset laughing at my accent and calling me a farmer, and when I lived and worked up north people were always calling me posh! My dp is from the northwest and like me doesn't have a strong accent, he's been asked by people from his hometown where he's from and they don't believe him when he tells them the same place they are because he sounds too posh!

I love this map!

(further to my previous answers, I just realised that another reason why I don't pay it any mind is because I actually am 'posh' - if you take posh to be from an upper middle class family - albeit not U.K. posh as I said. So they're only stating something that's true enough, but in real terms is neither here nor there. I guess that makes my situation rather different to yours. I can see how it would grate and why it would be annoying. I still say laugh it off, challenge it with humour, and don't let it get you down!)

Just own it.

'Aye, I'm well posh, me. Gerrabrew on, mine's an Earl Grey innit.'