A new study has revealed areas where people can spot someone faking their accent the best.
People from Glasgow, Belfast, and the north-east of England are better at telling when someone is faking their accent than people from London and Essex, research suggests.
In a study by Cambridge University, people from Belfast proved most able to detect someone imitating their accent, while people from London, Essex and Bristol were least accurate.
Corresponding author Dr Jonathan R Goodman, of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, said: “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.”
Researchers recruited around 50 speakers of seven accents of English and got them to read sentences in their own accents, and to read them while mimicking other accents.
The accents were: north-east England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex, and Received Pronunciation (RP), commonly understood as standard British English.
They then got participants to listen to short recordings and determine whether the accents were genuine or fake.
In a further phase of the study, researchers recruited more than 900 people from the UK and Ireland to listen to recordings and determine if the accents were mimicked or not.
The ability of study participants from Scotland, the north-east of England, Ireland and Northern Ireland to tell whether short recordings of their native accent were real or fake ranged from approximately 65% to 85%.
Those from Essex, London and Bristol had a success rate from just over 50%, barely better than chance, to 65% to 75%.
The researchers found that participants across all groups were better than chance at detecting fake accents, succeeding just over 60% of the time.
Participants who spoke naturally in the test accent tended to detect more accurately than non-native listener groups – some of which performed worse than chance – but success varied between regions.
The researchers argue that the accents of speakers from Belfast, Glasgow, Dublin and north-east England have culturally evolved over the past several centuries.
The authors wrote that during this time there have been “multiple cases of between-group cultural tension, especially with the cultural group making up south-east England, particularly London”.
They say that pressures “probably caused individuals from areas in Ireland and the northern regions of the UK to place emphasis on their accents as signals of social identity”.
The study’s authors argue that “greater social cohesion among accent speakers may have increased the risks posed by free riders from other groups, necessitating improved accent recognition and mimicry detection – characteristics probably not needed by individuals without strong cultural group boundaries, such as those living in London”.
The study points out that many speakers of the Essex accent moved to the area only over the past 25 years from London.
Previous research has indicated that when people want to demarcate themselves for cultural reasons, their accents become stronger.
Dr Goodman said: “Cultural, political or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity.
“Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect.
“I’m interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms.
“One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak.
“How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today.”
The research is published today in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences.
