Dr Peter Moore: It's how you say it!

One of the many things I love when I come home to Devon is going into a coffee shop and the barista saying: “What would you like, me loverly?”

Sometimes it’s 'me lover' or even 'me ‘ansome'. This would never happen anywhere else.

Of course, I know I’m not loverly, their lover or ‘ansome but the Devon accent and expressions are wonderful.

I never thought I had an accent until I went to college in London and one of my friends commented that it was obvious I came from the West Country.

Although the UK is relatively small compared to the US, we have an amazing mixture of accents. Bristol is different from Devon and Birmingham totally different from Bristol. Another 100 miles and Liverpool is different again.

In the TV series Vera from the North East, we hear 'love' and 'pet'. And I haven’t mentioned the Welsh and Scottish accents and all the accents around London with both Cockney and Estuary English.

When one of our sons married a girl from the East Midlands, her parents asked me whether I wanted a cob for lunch. I only knew cob as the mixture of mud and stone used for building our cottages. They found it hard to believe that I did not know it was a bread roll.

I tried not to call them grockles when they stayed with us because, as I looked around Nottingham, I was a grockle myself.

Sadly, a recent report by the Sutton Trust has shown that strong accents can still lead to discrimination and failure to gain promotion. There was little progress between 1969 and 2019.

The researchers spoke to 500 sixth formers applying to university, 1,000 students at university and 1,000 older professionals. Many claimed that their accents had been a problem leading to bullying and prejudice.

People with King’s English, received pronunciation or RP, were consistently more successful even if they were no better qualified. Despite the BBC’s attempts to broaden their accents, 70 per cent of newsreaders still speak RP.

The idea behind George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion or My Fair Lady is still topical. A flower girl with a Cockney accent will not be as successful as someone from a public school however talented. Or, to quote the play: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

When asked to rank accents out of seven, with seven as the best, RP was top with 5.23 followed by Scottish, American, Southern Irish, German and Welsh. The West Country accent came exactly in the middle with 3.73 with Indian, Liverpool and Birmingham the bottom three.

The categories are a bit vague. We’re lumped in with Bristol but there’s a girt great difference between the accent in Bristol than in Devon. And surely the Glasgow accent is not the same as Edinburgh, not least because I cannot understand a word Glaswegians are saying.

In the past there were good reasons for dropping your accent in the UK. The ruling class all came from public schools. Most of these were boarding schools with students from all over the country.

Showing you had a 'good' accent made people think that you were well educated from a public school and not from the lower classes.

But do we still have a subconscious bias? When the Cornishman David Penhaligan was elected MP for Truro in 1974 as soon as they heard his strong Cornish accent, he was put on all the farming committees. He had no experience of farming and was a trained engineer.

And how do you feel when you hear a strong scouse accent? There is no need to check your wallet, or assume someone with a Brummie accent is not very bright but these are the ridiculous prejudices that still remain.

Call centres often base themselves in Scotland as the Scottish accent sounds more honest.

So how do we assess accents, me lover? Perhaps the real test is to ask them to pronounce Hele or Shiphay.