Accents speak louder than words

WHAT a difference a few vowels can make. That was the lesson Andrew Taylor learnt one day at school, when the French teaching assistant turned to the class and announced: "I am going to give each of you a piss of pepper."

The incident made a lasting impression on Taylor and has led to his book A Plum In Your Mouth, an accessible, insightful and amusing read on pronunciation.

Taylor, whose Yorkshire accent has been buffeted by years working in the media down south, has hit on a British obsession. As he points out, how we say something has often been as significant as what we say. Pronounce 'glaahhs' for glass, and 'baahhth' for bath, and people will immediately make assumptions about your background, your education, and whether or not you are going to inherit from mummy and daddy. In Britain, accents and pronunciation are the means we use to locate people socially and geographically, in the same way as surnames sometimes do in other countries.

What Taylor reveals, however, is that although certain accents in Britain are associated with wealth and the middle to upper classes - RP or Received Pronunciation - people don't always aspire to those accents.

Lord Reith and the men of the BBC may have hoped to smooth out the "appalling travesties of vowel production" with a promotion of BBC English, but such an aspiration didn't take hold.

Far from wiping out regional accents, the various ways in which we can pronounce numerous words continues to flourish in an age of television and radio.

The point, says Taylor, is that people hang on to their regional and national accents as a source of pride and identity. There is an 'us and them' quality to the way people speak.

The joy of Taylor's book is its rich celebration of accents. A veritable cacophony of different voices sound from its pages, as the author covers accents from the West Country, Yorkshire, Liverpool, Wales and Scotland as well as Indian English, Black English, Australian and American.

He points to the ever changing nature of pronunciation, and covers some of the historical shifts that have led us to speak the way we do today.

Much of the pleasure in reading this book is Taylor's fluid and relaxed style. His linguistic research is solid, but this is no dusty, dry tome with an academic discussion of phonemes and diphthongs.

Instead his book quotes the well-known voices of celebrities and politicians, and is peppered with quips and anecdotes, from the wry and funny to the deadly. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, Taylor notes grimly, gunmen would ask people to pronounce the name of the jeweller's 'H Samuel'. While Protestants would drop the 'h', Catholics would keep it, and how you answered was a serious business.

A Plum In Your Mouth is a lively, fascinating read for anyone who has ever felt the irresistible urge to correct someone else's way of speaking - not that there is any 'correct' way of pronouncing half the words in English. It is also an illuminating, informative study on pronunciation and the prejudices and snobberies that go with it.