Bonjour, Monsieur Barton!

Not being a fan of football, I'd never felt compelled to write about it in relation to language – until now. This is because today we learn of Liverpool-born footballer Joey Barton, currently on a 12-month stint in Marseille, has seemingly adopted a French accent in his own speech and, by extension, the speech patterns of native French people when they speak English. C'est incroyable, ne c'est pas? Well, when you listen to the clip of him speaking, it's not incredible at all; it's perfectly understandable. And that's the point!

The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.

Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood. 

Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:

"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"

Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.

"that"

Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).

"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."

Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!

But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.

The price of being posh

This week I read that the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch had apparently been complaining that he was only ever offered 'posh' roles on account of his background and private education. The origin of the word posh is unknown. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the attractive folk etymology that it is an acronym of 'port out, starboard home' – supposedly indicating the more expensive, preferred cabins on a ship travelling east – popularised for people of mine and Cumberbatch's generation in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Several dictionary definitions do, however, record the word as pertaining to the upper class.

And there it is, the dirtiest word in the English language: class. So the journalists were queuing up to analyse whether or not we have a problem with 'posh-bashing' and inverted snobbery. Cumberbatch got to Harrow on a scholarship after attending a fee-paying preparatory school. I mean, he's one of us, isn't he? He's just like all the other Benedicts we know. If it really is all so unfair on the poor chap, Hannah Betts of The Guardian thinks that maybe he should move to America because it's 'classless'. So classless, in fact, that US audiences can't get enough of class-conscious English dramas like Downton Abbey (described by Cumberbatch himself as "atrocious"), Gosford Park, as well as anything with even the faintest whiff of the House of Windsor.

But while exploiting and bemoaning Britain's class divisions is something of a national sport, I'd say that we're all missing the point focussing on upper class pretensions when the real issue is one's accent and what an albatross it can be. Let's face it, if Hugh Grant didn't play up his accent in every role, we'd finally recognise just what a fantastic actor he is, wouldn't we? But we should also take note from Stephen Fry, a man who seems to be universally liked but who clearly recognises the advantages of his own accent:

"My vocal cords are made of tweed. I give off an air of Oxford donnishness and old BBC wirelesses."

In my first term at university in 1994, in one memorable seminar we were required to take part in a demonstration of a classic sociolinguistic experiment. We listened to a variety of UK accents and were asked to make judgements about the ages, statuses and backgrounds of the speakers of each accent. Having completed this exercise (called the matched-guise test), we were forced to confront our own prejudices when it was revealed that all the accents had in fact been recorded by the same actor.

So I can't help thinking that maybe if Benedict Cumberbatch were similarly able to demonstrate his versatility as an actor, and take on a role that was out of character and required a different accent (i.e. not his own); perhaps he could eventually avoid the kind of typecasting he currently finds so unfair. Numerous surveys of the most prestigious, preferred and pilloried UK accents have been conducted over the years. So if RP's days really are numbered, then surely actors from all backgrounds should be getting their tongues round an array of regional varieties as a means of guaranteeing a range of different roles in the future.