To listen to Dr Jonathan Goodman from the University of Cambridge saying the word "phoneme" (and he says it quite a lot), you might think he was putting on an accent. But apparently not. And that should be obvious because Jonathan is one of the researchers on a study published in the Evolutionary Human Sciences journal that concludes that Irish people are particularly good at spotting when someone is putting on an accent. So when Tom Cruise whispers to Nicole Kidman, "I've never seen anything like you in all of my livin' life," we can just somehow tell that the accent he's putting on is not his own.
The researchers, Jonathan told Sarah McInerney on Drivetime, wanted to look at the evolutionary origins of accents and how the way someone sounds gives us clues to their place of origin:
"Accents are a signal of someone’s social identity. So, for example, when you’re talking to me, even though I haven’t told you where I’m from, you can probably sense that I’m not from the UK or Ireland and that has something to do with the phonemes I’m using and the emphasis that we place on those phonemes in determining a person’s place of origin, something about their identity. That suggests that that’s been really important over the course of our evolutionary history."
The study wanted to find out how good – or not – people were at spotting when someone was faking an accent. They chose to look at seven accents across the UK and Ireland – four in England, as well as Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin. And the results were, well, interesting. The first finding was:
"Across the board, regardless of where people were from and what the accent was in question, people were quite a bit better than chance at telling when someone is faking an accent. About two-thirds of the time people were getting this right."
What that means, Jonathan says, is that when someone is faking an accent, even if we’re not familiar with that accent, the majority of us can tell they’re faking it. Which is impressive when you think about it. Here’s Jonathan again:
"When you detect that someone is faking, it’s kind of like trying to tell if someone is lying. They're misrepresenting themselves and that goes a bit past the specific phonemes that we might associate with a given accent."
The research revealed that people from Glasgow and Belfast were the best at spotting when someone is faking their accent. Sarah asked Jonathan why this was the case, and he said that they weren’t testing for that question, so they were forced to speculate about the possible reasons – pay attention now:
"Our best guess is that it has something to do with what we can call the cultural or ethno-linguistic homogeneity. To the degree that we have greater diversity in a given region, we might expect people to be a little less attuned to in-group-out-group relationships."
Glad we cleared that up. What? Okay, the translation goes something like this – when a person is from a region with many different accents, they tend to find it harder to spot fake accents than a person who’s in a region where there’s a lower level of accent variation. That explains why the study found that people who own accents were RP (received pronunciation) – who were mostly from London – performed the worst in the research at spotting fake accents.
One of the implications of the study – and the whole area of accents – is that we have accents and we put on accents in order to get the people we’re interacting with to trust us:
"From an evolutionary point of view, that would have undoubtedly been the origins, that, when we don’t know someone, someone who’s a stranger to us, you that comes into our group, the way they speak is going to send us a bunch of signals about whether we can trust them. And if we detect that they’re faking, that might be something that might lead us to have kind of a negative bias against them."
The next time you’re watching Far and Away, see if you feel you can trust Joseph or Shannon just from listening to them speaking.
You can hear the full chat between Sarah and Jonathan by tapping or clicking above.