It's OK to say 'yah' but not 'oo arrh'

Just 2 per cent of the population speak 'BBC English'. The rest can be made to feel cruelly rejected, writes Mary Braid

It started with a few jokes, and it ended in tears. The Footballer Steve Yates, it is reported, has asked London Premier League side Queen's Park Rangers for a transfer because his wife, Louise, 22, is upset by jokes from smart new Home Counties colleagues about her West Country accent.

Mrs Yates, 22, is apparently so distraught that she has changed jobs three times since moving from Bristol two years ago. But the "relentless" daily jibes continue. One employer apparently asked her not to answer the phone because it put customers off. But that was positively polite compared to workmates' jokes about Mrs Yates, a secretary with seven O- levels, being a "thick yokel".

"Anyone might have to put up with a certain level of teasing but with me it was every day," she says. All this from "posher" workmates who put petrol in the cahh rather than the car, or else who now fly the flag of Estuary English, an accent typified by Jonathan Ross that originated in the South-east and is now so beloved by the young and hip that it has spread as far north as Hull.

Wasn't it all just a little fun between colleagues? Why could Mrs Yates not just settle into the reassuring, stereotypical role so nicely reinforced by the Wurzels in their classic anthem to the West Country, "I got a brand new combine 'arvester"? She could have taken to saying oo arrh and chewing straw. Is that not what people with those accents are supposed to do: act the clown and take it on the chin; not develop a boring chip on their shoulder? After all, it wasn't a personal attack on her; just a harmless little go at her accent.

Wrong, says Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. For attacks on the accent, he argues, are an assault at the very heart of the person. And some victims of accent attack, he says, have been driven far beyond finding another job.

"When I worked for Radio 4's English Now we got hundreds of letters from people penalised because of their accents," he says. "Their reaction ranged from getting upset, to resigning and moving house - even to committing suicide. It is so closely related to your sense of identity."

Mrs Yates was apparently so miserable she was often in tears. The experience is hardly uncommon. But those who suffer are shy of publicity.

"I've had to laugh it off all my life," says Susan, 33, an advertising executive, a Brummie who works in London. "When I went to grammar school I was so conscious of not fitting in that I considered elocution lessons. But that would have hurt my parents. Now my colleagues are middle-class South-easterners. My accent is associated with stupidity and ignorance and I think that has limited my career. There are always those who will use the accent against me, crack jokes to bring me down. You laugh but at times you wish the ground would open and swallow you. You are usually on your guard to speak like they do but when you relax you slip back into your own language."

The power of accent to determine your social chances cannot be underestimated. We fool ourselves that Britain these days is a meritocracy in which accent and dialect do not matter. But Professor Crystal says nothing has changed since the days when the broadcaster Sue Lawley - as a student, according to legend - began eradicating her Black Country accent in favour of BBC English, otherwise known as Received Pronunciation (RP) to improve her career chances, and a young Mandi Norwood, a decade before she became editor of Cosmopolitan, decided to move in with a Sloane to suffocate the Newcastle accent she grew up with. "Accent matters as much as it ever did," says Professor Crystal. "Perhaps even more so."

The sociolinguist Professor Peter Trudgill says Britain is unique in its development of a single prestigious accent that still dominates even though it is spoken by only 2 per cent of the population. It remains the accent of authority. It may no longer be necessary for delivering the weather but is almost a qualification to read the news.Yet its dominance is no more than an accident, rooted, some academics say, in the public school system.

It is no good telling linguists that RP is the public's preferred accent because it sounds nicer, or that the former Labour leader John Smith's dulcet Scottish tones were prettier than Neil Kinnoch's Welsh valleys accent. Or that all those sneering comments about John Major's vowels boil down to the fact that they are just ugly. Aesthetics, it appears, have nothing to do with it. Subject visiting Americans to a range of British accents and Cockney comes near the top, not the bottom, of their list. The dreaded Brummie is also an American favourite.

"All this about correct English is really to do with social class," says Professor Trudgill. He argues that the extent of social discrimination through accent is completely underplayed and that it should rank alongside racial and sexual discrimination.

But only occasionally do people take accent attacks to court or tribunal. Satisfaction is hard to come by, as Jean Briscoe, a Birmingham secretary found when she went to an industrial tribunal to accuse her former employers of racial discrimination after they sacked her for speaking Brum. Her boss, who incidentally shared her accent, insisted she sounded unprofessional on the phone. His solicitor argued that Mrs Briscoe's speech displayed a "lack of grammatical integrity". Apparently after months of "yer", "norrin" and "ain't" it was the way she said "It's yer wife" on the phone that earned her her P45. Though the tribunal could not find her bosses guilty of racial discrimination, it said they had dealt with her "shabbily". If there was such an offence as social discrimination the tribunal system would probably grind to a halt dealing with cases.

James Kelman, the controversial Booker prize-winning author who has laboured for years to develop an authentic literary voice for working-class Scots, says attacks on regional and social "voices" are an act of social oppression. In BBC2's The Late Show last week Kelman said he became aware of class and the unacceptability of his own voice when he joined the Boys' Brigade.

"And at school you were constantly being told: 'Your language is not fit for decent people to hear'," he recalled. "And if you used words like 'Aye' in the classroom, the teacher would belt you or tell you you shouldn't do that ... if you spoke in a normal way you were punished." Kelman believes working-class people are excluded from literature and their intellectual capacity denied because of the rejection of their language.

For Barrie Rutter, Yorkshire-born actor and theatre director, developing an authentic artistic voice has also involved a rejection of the dominant RP. "There was a sort of Green Room understanding that people like me could never play kings or princes because of our accents," he says. Mr Rutter seemed destined always to play comic roles such as the drunken porter in Macbeth. In the early days resisting RP was no act of political defiance. "I simply couldn't get my bloody lips around it," he remembers.

Four years ago he founded the theatre company Northern Broadsides, which has enjoyed huge success with its revisionist productions of Shakespeare and its presentation - of both kings and clowns - in northern voices. Fans are impressed by the rawness and energy of actors performing in the voices they were born with. Mr Rutter believes he is involved in a just reclamation and that the company provides relief from those tight "from the neck up" RP performances. "I am fed up with the appropriation of our culture by a voice and attitude that are only 110 years old."

That frustration is directly connected to theexperience of Louise Yates and many like her. Although attitudes to local accents have softened at school, the wisest teachers probably still explain to pupils that to get on requires two voices: one for home, one for work.

For no one is immune to the power of accent, not even Professor Trudgill. "People with Harold Macmillan RP are always guilty until proven innocent," he admits laughing. "And I like London accents in London but not in Norfolk, where I come from. There they make me feel we are being overrun." At least he is aware that his preference has more to do with politics, social attitudes and prejudice than any inherent aesthetic.

Accents: the league table

1 RP: eg Princess Di; 'Panorama' interviewers

2 'Educated' Scots: Malcolm Rifkind, Dr Findlay

3 'Educated' Welsh: Anthony Hopkins

4 Irish: that lovable lilter, Terry Wogan

5 Yorkshire: as spun by Geoffrey Boycott

6 West Country: the Wurzels

7 Geordie: gaining street cred after Jimmy Nail

8 Cockney: it's good to tawk - Bob Hoskins

9 Scouse: The Mersey sound of the Beatles

10 'Raw' Glaswegian: Rab C Nesbitt

11 West Midlands: Frank Skinner, bottom of the league

Estuary English: not placed, bubbling under.