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Does your voice broadcast your intellect?

20:52 / 18.06.02

Ok, broad subject title I know, but hear me out. I recently went to a friend's wedding celebration, and, whilst chatting to a rather comely young lady, she came out with the comment that she liked me because I - apparantly - spoke "all posh".
Now this has happened before, inasmuch as I've been asked a number of time throughout my adult life which public school I attended (actually I went to a rather grotty little state school in Devon), or whether I was at Oxford or Cambridge (my actual port of call being the famous university town of Southampton *ahem*).

Now I'm assuming that these impressions of me have been gathered because I am softly and politely spoken, but they do cause me to consider the degree to which we make certain assumptions about others based purely on their speech (and here I refer to style and pronunciation, rather than grammar or diction). Do you immediately assume somebody has a relatively high intelligence simply because they are 'well-spoken', or, conversely, are you happy to accept people at face value, and construct your opinions of them after speaking them?

It occurs to me that part of this may be some class system throwback, but my question is more aimed at ascertaining whether you think those who are well spoken are more intelligent, and not whether they belong to a certain class. A natural progression to this question - although I personally disagree with it - could be whether you think that intellect naturally breeds good speech (i.e. the cleverer you are, the more able you are to articulate yourself)?

22:39 / 18.06.02

Are you talking about regional/class accents or command over language?

04:21 / 19.06.02

I think there's a kind of natuaral us/them detector.

Scene from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? I can't remember any of the character's names, and I'm honestly afraid of recounting the story without offending someone. Anybody here remember the details? One line was "But if you KNOW better."

04:49 / 19.06.02

Are you talking about the scene in the courtroom?

Gregory Peck: "Are you ambidextrous?"
Farmer: "Of course not. I kin use one hand just as well as the other!"

I guess i don't know just what you're refering to, cuz.

07:21 / 19.06.02

i do feel sometimes like i have to 'posh up' my working class, london accent, in order to be taken seriously, for others to actually hear *what* i'm saying, rather than how i say it.

an uncle of mine rather reinvented himself many years ago. he's polish, and self employed, and did much better in his work when he changed his name to an english name. along with that, he adopted a very upper class accent, and i think that helped, too. also, when he complains about things, he gets action. he's never aggressive, basically, he sounds rich.

i do sometimes have problems with my own class peers. i *hate* the way some londoners talk, especially some of the younger women. it seems like the accent is being overdone to such an extent that it's sometimes impossible to understand what's being said. it could be the most intelligent thing ever uttered, but if people cannot understand you, you are doing yourself a disservice.

07:36 / 19.06.02

Well - if you heard someone talking with a very posh accent, I don't think you'd assume that they were intelligent. Look at the home life of our own dear Queen - very posh accents, vast majority of them thick as two short planks (see especially Andrew, Edward, probably Harry). But, as SFD says, it certainly does make them sound rich, and, well, posh... so more an indicator of class than intelligence.

07:39 / 19.06.02

Most people naturally assume me to be thick because of my Wigan accent.

12:51 / 19.06.02

Im thankfully fairly free of my local accent, as a strong baltimore accent is a very abrasive, nearly unbearable sound (and I dont need a voice to match my personality, eh?)

13:35 / 19.06.02

I'm terribly guilty of making that kind of judgment.

I've always felt that the way a person speaks is indicative of their level of education, not necessarily their level of intelligence. Which is ridiculous, considering that the best-spoken folk I know are all high school drop-outs, and that I'm one myself. Then again, though, we're all self-educated rather than uneducated, and did a markedly better job of it than the educational system could've...

In Canada, we don't really have regional accents, only the broad groupings of urban and rural speakers (The East Coast is an exception to this rule, as are people of the First Nations. Any other Canadians out there, please feel free to correct me, as I'm from Ontario...). So I'm not exactly sure whether the bias against people who speak with said rural accent is due to the way they speak, or whether it's due to the fact that people from the city automatically assume that country folk don't have a whole lot between the ears to begin with...

14:23 / 19.06.02

Every native Floridian I've ever met can turn on and off a Southern accent depending on who they're talking to. It's useful, especially when setting up Yankees.

15:05 / 19.06.02

...the accents and word usage from my hometown (NE Pennsylvania) can be quite annoying and off-putting. Similar to the Fargo talk in Minnesota but not as strong. Words like "Mine" sound like "Mayan"..."Hundred" becomes "hunert"...while phrase like "down the line" mean going to a local urban center down the river. There is quite a bit of a local slang that floats about.

Some people I met in college as well as myself have worked hard to fight it but do pick up on some Philly word usage. In my opinion it doesn't necessarily some of as a strong indicator of intelligence but more of a class construct. The accents are heavier in the middle class and working poor than in your upper class peoples. But being understood can seem like an intelligence indicator when trying to have a conversation with a local and finding that you can't understand half of what is being said.

18:25 / 19.06.02

I have a bit of a south side Chicago accent, which isn't nearly as annoying as East Coast accents, it's a lot lazier, and slower. I pronounce "hundred" as "hunerd"; "motherfucker" as "mullerfucker"; "jagoff" as "jay-goff"; and a bunch more that I cannot think of at the moment (it's not so fargone to where I pronounce my th's as d's [as in da Bulls or as my friend's dad likes to say, "Dere's notin' wrong wit dat"]). Yet people seem to think of me as intelligent quite often, for whatever reason. And I can turn the accent off if I need to, like at a job interview or something like that. My mother had a rougher time about 25 years back as she had a southern accent (the southern Illinois/Kentuckey southern accent, which is the southern accent that gets mocked most of the time) which she had to work extremely hard to get rid of to avoid constant teasing and discrimination whilst in college.

18:31 / 19.06.02

I seem to have developed a Belfast accent during my stay here, and yes, in general people treat you as thick when they hear it anywhere outside Northern Ireland. I don't know why...it's not all bigoted terrorists in jackboots over here you know.

People do have this idea that certain accents reflect your class/wealth/intelligence. Hence the image of people who speak "the Queen's English".

19:52 / 19.06.02

In Canada, folks from Ontario think that regional dialects don't exist. The rest of us know better

There are a few distinctive regional speech patterns aside from the obvious East Coast accent: folks from B.C. tend to speak much more slowly, Quebecers have a strong French influence to their English.

If you have a Newfie accent, people automatically assume you've got the intellect of a salted codfish. I made a point of losing my accent within the first three months of moving to Ontario, because I was sick of the Newfie jokes and having the concept of indoor plumbing explained to me (on the assumption that all Newfies use outhouses...). Maybe because the province is so multicultural (there's a high population of people with English as a second language in Ontario), most people around here don't seem very attuned to nuances of dialect. I still have a lot of newfie elements to my speech patterns, but they're usually only picked up by people from outside Ontario. Or when I'm really, really drunk.

20:11 / 19.06.02

Can you write out something in Newfie?

Oh, and Copkiller, I always assumed da ting in Chicago, where da words come out all scrunched like dat, wit da "d" in place of da "th"? Allus tought dat was a gift from da Polish poplation up dere.

Much like the long, honey-sweet vowels of the southeast came from the English uppah clahss - the la-und ownahs, back in the day.

20:27 / 19.06.02

Betty: according to my Canadian relatives, the archetypal Quebecer sentence--equivalent to the Bostonian's "Pahhk y' cahh in Hahhvahhd Yahhd"--is "T'row your fadder down de stairs his hat, eh?"

uncle retrospective

21:27 / 19.06.02

I've been told that Newfie is a melding for the french and Irish accents. All I have to say is I hope I've been lied to.

I've had problems with my accent as well, I was sent to a grammer school with gave me a bit of an upperclass twang that got me into all sorts of trouble. Sounding upperclass english (which is almost exatly what a posh Irish accent sounds like)growing up in one of the most hardened republican towns in Ireland is not fun. Then I moved to sunderland in england it got worse, I started picking up northernism's and using english syntax with that accent got me in more trouble. I made a point of getting rid of it but it's mutated into south Dublin. The snobby end.
Arse.

21:45 / 19.06.02

Gawd. Far too many thinks in that post. Forgive me, I have been filling in postgrad application forms all day, and I can no longer think properly anyway, hence the obsession with the word. Application forms are the root of all evil...

22:44 / 19.06.02

Ah, I found the passage from To Kill a Mockingbird.

“ ‘That’s why you don’t talk like the rest of ‘em,’ said Jem.
‘The rest of who?’
‘Rest of the coloured folks. Cal, but you talked like they did in church…’
That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.
‘Cal’, I asked, ‘why do you talk nigger-take to the – to your folks when you know it’s not right?’
‘Well in the first place I’m black’
‘That doesn’t mean you hafta talk that way when you know better,’, said Jem.
Calpurnia tilted her hat and scratched her head, then pressed her head down carefully over her ears. ‘It’s right hard to say,’ she said. ‘Suppose you and Scout talked coloured-folks’ talk at home – it’d be out of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if I talked white folks’ talk at church, and with my neighbours? They’d think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses.’”

The Return Of Rothkoid

23:49 / 19.06.02

Reputedly, I sound more sophisticated as a result of my time in the UK. Which is patently a sack of arse...

04:53 / 20.06.02

Frankly, I'm astounded that people can type the spelling of their personal accents, when I always assumed that one would hear one's own accent as "neutral" and everyone else would sound like they were talking funny in relation to that neutral.

I'm a native Californian -- we export our accent for profit.

10:11 / 20.06.02

I'm from Birmingham - I'm used to the prejudice this can cause, and not just when it's a matter of accent. I do have something of a mutant accent, which meanders through Blackburn and a few other places, but occasionally something does pop out which is tremendously brummie.
Which means I'm thick, according to most accent surveys I've seen.

I guess it's just the usual stereotyping -
If you sound like you're from Liverpool, you steal cars and possess scouse wit. Newcastle - you like beer and fighting. Cornwall = tractor. Brummie - thick and boring. Ridiculously posh - no chin and a tendency to fall over without the support of servants.

On the other hand, if avoiding all of this means you have to adopt some sort of colourless Queen's English, then I'll stay the way I am. I can't think of an accent which has positive enough connotations to want to adopt it.

14:38 / 20.06.02

The voice in my head is silkily, sophisticatedly smooth and free of class and regional nuance. The voice I hear on tape which purports to be an authentic reproduction of the above is that of dead common homo West Lothianensis. The reality lies somewhere in between no doubt.

In feedback on an Italian oral exam, one of my tutors told me I spoke that language too like a Scottish chip shop owner. Now that really hurt.

If I ever did judge people's intelligence by their accent or their command of grammar, I have long abandoned the habit because of the number of times I made badly mistaken assumptions.

Morlock - groupie for hire

16:55 / 20.06.02

Hmmm, well I now manage to speak my native dutch like a foreigner, and my English like I'm from nowhere in particular. Textbook English, softly spoken, and invariably muffled by at least one of my feet. Sad, really.