Of course they weren’t being mean, but each time my university friends jokingly echoed my Leeds-accented “no” with a noise that is perhaps best approximated as “nerhhh”, I found myself undergoing elocution conditioning. Within a year, the identifying characteristics of my accent had gone, replaced with a sort of unplaceable, vaguely northern voice. It didn’t matter that we were at university in Leeds, my home city, where most of the population had a stronger accent than me; it was novel – and apparently amusing – to those who had come from the south.
It’s now a familiar scenario. With an increasing north-south divide in university admissions, campuses in the north are teeming with southerners. That may be inevitable under the circumstances, but it can leave students from the surrounding areas feeling out of place only a few miles from where they grew up.
