Hello, American here. I’m watching Naked Attraction, a dating show based in England, and towards the end of every segment they analyze the contestants accent to clarify what area of England/ Europe they were raised in. They spend a fair amount of time on it and sometimes their facial expression indicates a bias. Is this very important to English people and it so, why?
Americans have many different type of accents but I’ve never really seen it so closely analyzed here. I’ve certainly never seen it used as a barrier to dating someone.
Thank you for your time!
12 comments
Firstly, you might want to put this on r/askuk or r/askabrit as this is about our opinions in general. You’ll get more answers from us there.
Secondly, to answer the question it comes down to regional bias and stereotyping. It’s basically parochialism and I’m guessing you’d find similar in other European countries with a history of high centralisation – I’m thinking France in particular. The different areas of the country have long been characterised as having specific traits – almost universally negative ones – which we use to insult each other and pat ourselves on the head.
It likely originates from several centuries ago, when London was really the only city with any sort of national importance at all. Consequently Londoners saw themselves as the be-all and end-all of society and thought that anyone who hadn’t moved to London was intentionally cutting themselves off from civilisation and culture (I’m talking about middle/upper class people – obviously they didn’t want the riff-raff lower class in their city).
Combine this with regional distinctions and you end up with ingrained stereotypes of different areas. For example, Londoners have a similar reputation to New Yorkers – self-important, don’t care about anyone else, always living at 100mph but never actually enjoying life. Yorkshire is seen as stuck in the 1900s with a fear of technology and believing that they are better human beings than everyone else. Cornwall and Devon are seen as so out of the way that they have forgotten the rest of the world exists, Norfolk is seen as a bunch of inbred farmers, Birmingham is seen as an industrial hellscape with no class or style, Liverpool is seen as a city full of criminals. Scotland, Wales and Norn Iron obviously have their own distinctions too but in general: ‘self-righteous’, ‘all work down the coal mines’ and ‘religious fundamentalists’.
I think it’s important I put this in here: **these are stereotypes**. They are very crude characterisations done for the purposes of making fun of people, and bantering/making fun of people is a major part of British culture. They can be a lot more specific than regional things too – many of us have a lot of negative stereotypes about the nearest towns to us, too, and heck, I even remember when at school we used to even mock the kids at the other school in the town as basically being violent criminals. For the most part we don’t actually really believe these things, and when we say them we tend to be saying them for the sake of humour, not because of genuine hatred – though, like racist jokes of the past, they probably cut a bit too sharply to be fair to make. Also, when the other person you are bantering about is not actually there to banter back it does tend to turn into a bit of meanness.
In general though, there are very few of us around who genuinely believe these things so much that they would actually judge other people on them. It’s worth pointing out that you are talking about a reality TV programme, and the producers of those shows often deliberately incite the contestants to make unfair or insensitive comments because it generates controversy, which generates views, which generates profit.
I think in the US also they’re like that about regions. Only the country is bigger so how fine grained it gets is relatively big, except when talking to the very local. Someone from rural NY meets someone not from the state they talk about state and then maybe part of state. Oh you’re Texas, like Texas West or East or North. Etc then they meet someone else from rural New York and it gets more village or at least county specific. If two citizens from New York City born and lived their whole lives in New York City meet then it gets very fine grained down to the many small neighbourhood contained within the buroughs
I don’t think this is particularly ‘English’… it’s the same thing in most European countries (certainly here in Italy) and in many other parts of the world too.
Including the US in my experience… there are plenty of stereotypes about (say) people from California,Texas,New York or Alabama.
I wouldn’t say we’re “so concerned” but when you’re on a show where you’re analysing people based on available evidence, then it’s one way to make some cliché assumptions (they’re from the opposite end of the country to me, northerners are more outgoing, Irish accents are attractive, not keen on the Brummie accent, or whatever it might be).
The UK has a huge variety of regional accents, sometimes from one town to the other (and even within cities like North and South London) and we have four constituent countries (England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland) so there are definitely regional cultures and stereotypes in abundance!
Coming in just to clarify the “which area of Europe” bit. While national areas may have stereotypes and small differences attached (e.g. maybe scotland vs england is comparable to Texas vs Florida), when you cross national borders there could be huge cultural differences (e.g. England vs Italy could be like Canada vs Mexico)
**Parochialism is less prevalent or significant in the USA because people identity with their “Ethnic Group” and they move around a lot from one state to another as** **opposed to Europeans who seems to not move as much.**
I’m not saying that the concept is unknown in the US. There’s “stereotypes’ about the different states and the people who live in each one. But I feel that paraochialism is much less because people identity with their “Ethnic group”
I don’t claim to speak on behalf of every community in the US. Saying something, no matter where I move I’m a “X ethnicity” and that’s what I represent.” To move from one state to another doesn’t change someone’s ethnic group affiliation, which is their primary affiliation. People of the same ‘Ethnic group” will have more in common with people from the same city. At least in practice. For instance, a minority who moves to another state will tend to “hang out” with people from the same minority group than the people of their former city or state.
For millennia, regular Europeans had very little access to areas that were beyond a day’s walking distance. Similarly, mountains and rivers formed almost impassable obstacles to communication across communities.
Two villages could speak different dialects or even languages. The cultural differences were pretty huge.
So huge that nationalism was *invented* to collectivize these groups.
We have been Tavastians, Northumbrians, Bohemians, etc. much longer than we’ve been Finns, Brits or German.
Very common for Old World countries where you can see significant differences between regions even over small distances. I am British, but in Korea and they are exactly the same. The Jeju dialect is almost like a different language.
The Industrial Revolution brought us all closer together, but we spent centuries and centuries separated by a river or a mountain range etc.
England for example, used to have its own timezones with clocks set at different times between just London and Bristol. Trains changed all that and it wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme for a nation just a little over 1000 years old.
>Americans have many different type of accents but I’ve never really seen it so closely analyzed here.
No, I don’t think so. Americans have far milder accents in comparison. In Britain these accents come with a certain region with it’s own local humour, it’s own expressions but also a certain attitude towards life or society, just different cultures basically.
I haven’t watched that show but I don’t think we are generally that concerned about where people are born. Some people might prefer some accents I guess but I don’t really know why they focus so much on it.
To a european, some parts of american culture are bizarre as well. To me it seems that all conversations between americans (when they first meet) revolve around where they are from, where they were born, where they moved to, then the other person says he also lived or been to one of the mentioned states/regions, and so on…
Different regions are quite different.
My family is half Ukrainian and half Spanish. My Ukrainian family is from Ivano Frankivsk, in the carpathian mountain region of Ukraine. My Spanish family is mostly Andalusian and Castilian.
Do I feel connected to other Ukrainians and Spainiards from other regions? Absolutely. But a Ukrainian from Kyiv has a kind of different culture than I do, we are both still Ukrainians of course, but we are also different in many ways. There is nothing wrong with these differences, they are what make the tapestry of our cultures so beautiful. But even within the Spanish side of my family I know the differences between Castilla y León and Andalucía are quite large, let alone the differences between those and the parts of Spain that don’t even speak Spanish natively.