People in the Northern UK and Ireland Can Flag Your Fake Accent

During the Second World War, Dutch citizens allegedly identified German spies by asking them to say Scheveningen, the name of a seaside town. The word contains sounds that are common in Dutch but absent in German, making it difficult for anyone born outside the Netherlands to pronounce it correctly. Whether true or apocryphal, the anecdote demonstrates the strong connections among language, accents, and history.

A new study, published in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, shows those connections in a different part of Europe. Researchers from the University of Cambridge found that people from the cities of Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin, all in the northern areas of the UK and Ireland, were remarkably better at detecting fake accents than people from the southern UK.

For their experiment, researchers gathered 50 participants to record themselves pronouncing a selection of test sentences— including “Hold up those two cooked tea bags” and “She kicked the goose hard with her foot”—in their native accents, which included those of northeast England, Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow, Essex, Bristol, and Received Pronunciation (RP, or standard British English). Then, the same participants were recorded speaking the sentences in the other six accents. They then judged which speakers sounded natural and which seemed to be faking it.

In the next phase of the study, 900 additional participants from the UK and Ireland, some of which were put in a control group, were asked to listen to the recordings and guess which speakers’ accents were fake or genuine. 

People from Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin guessed correctly 65 to 85 percent of the time, while people from Essex, Bristol, and London got it right 50 to 75 percent of the time.

Detecting Outsiders

What caused the northerners to develop such a keen ear for insincere accents remains unclear. Study author Jonathan Goodman, a professor in Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, and his team suggest the ability may have developed due to Ireland and Scotland’s tumultuous political history. 

“We think that the ability to detect fake accents is linked to an area’s cultural homogeneity, the degree to which its people hold similar cultural values,” he said a statement. The social cohesion in the northern cities may have made their residents sensitive to their own accents, as well as perceptive to unfamiliar ones. This homogeneity was likely driven by conflict with other cultures in the British Isles. 

“Cultural, political, or even violent conflict [is] likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion,” Goodman said. “Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect.”

If that made residents of Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin better at detecting fake accents, the lack of conformity could explain why people from Essex, London, and Bristol are comparatively worse at it. Researchers argue that these urban areas are generally more heterogenous, with new arrivals introducing their accents to the mix and being more readily absorbed into the culture, making accents more difficult to distinguish.

The study found that people from Essex even have trouble identifying their own accents—perhaps because the typical Essex accent has changed in recent years as people have moved there from London.

Bottom line: Next time you’re in an Irish bar or a Scottish pub, don’t try to impress the server by speaking with the local accent—chances are, they’ll know you’re faking it. 

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