The lasting power of an accent – harputburgerwiesbaden

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The writer is a researcher based at Cambridge University and author of the forthcoming Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World

How people talk can matter more than what they say. Ukrainian soldiers use specific phonemes — pronounced parts of words — with which Russian speakers struggle to distinguish friends from enemies. Remarkably, the biblical story a Shibboleth echoed the same idea: thousands of years ago, a victorious tribe killed the vanquished, finding those who could only say “Sibboleth” – a trait that, according to the scriptures, led to the death of more than 40,000 people.

Determining a person’s social origins through language is an ancient practice and highlights how important small linguistic differences are to notions of society and identity. This is the consequence of how we evolved. Throughout history, we’ve had to trust strangers carefully: be biased toward those who look or sound like us, and toward those who seem different.

Today, we often joke about the signals that make up the accents of languages around the world. We use them in our everyday social interactions to learn something about the people we meet. However, where there is tension between groups, these indicators can quickly become serious – rekindling our tribal instincts.

These forces have an enduring power, just like us found in a research project I drove to Cambridge. We asked 1,000 people from the UK and Ireland to guess whether someone was faking one of seven regional accents. They were good at it, finding a cheat about two-thirds of the time, regardless of where the listener was or what the fake accent was.

Interestingly, this varied across regions: people in places with historical cultural tensions with the UK’s south were better at telling whether someone was faking the listener’s own accent. Someone from Belfast, for example, could say a fake Belfast accent about 75 percent of the time, while someone speaking what is considered Standard British English was right just over half the time.

Many people have asked about this regional difference: why should people in Belfast or Glasgow be better at spotting cheaters than people in the south of England? I think the answer lies in the tribalism we’ve evolved to exhibit, for better or for worse. (Sometimes in Belfast, as in Ukraine today, having the wrong accent had serious consequences.) Historical tensions within and between cultural groups almost certainly led to a greater emphasis on social identity and a greater need for to be able to tell friends from enemies. Tribalism reappears when people need it.

But accents also explain how trust is formed among people and serve as a shibboleth by which we categorize them.

How we interpret them can even affect policy, such as through linguistic assessment for determining origin, which is used by governments. including in Great Britain. For this, trained linguists interview someone seeking asylum to determine whether they are from, say, Syria rather than Iraq. One wrong step can lead to deportation – and using the test suggests how much speech patterns infect every level of our lives. This is despite questions about whether or not it really works language patterns are often too complex for anyone but a native listener to discern effectively.

Accents are facets of human communication, which in turn is the means by which we can be honest or deceptive. Sociologist Diego Gambetta, who specializes in Italy’s criminal underworld, says mafia members sometimes menacingly disguised their accents in telephone conversations to associate themselves with areas of Sicily known to be more dangerous. And often unconsciously, people shift their accents to reflect those of the people around them—an example of what sociolinguists call code-switching, which can help build social relationships.

The uses of these signals are varied and fluid, but they can have serious effects on both speaker and listener. Our accents can tell others about our social identity, portray our authenticity (or lack thereof), and help us distinguish friends from foes.

However, today, with tribalistic signals growing stronger across the political spectrum, we should remember that it is in the interests of extremists around the world to keep people divided along lines of affiliation—and focus on the signals that divide us rather than the ideas that unify. . So when you hear another accent, don’t see it as a separation marker. Take the opportunity to interact with someone new.