Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
Across the UK and Ireland, people from Belfast are best at detecting when someone is faking their accent – while people from London are worst at it, according to a new study.
The study, published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, also finds that people from Glasgow, Dublin and the northeast of England could find an “accent mimic” more accurately, while those from Bristol and Essex performed less well.
“We found a pretty pronounced difference in accent cheater detection between these areas,” says corresponding author Dr Jonathan Goodman, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
“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.”
The researchers asked 55 speakers of 7 different British Isles accents (northeast England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex, and received pronunciation – RP) to record themselves reading out a set of sentences.
Then, they asked the same speakers to read out the sentences in their best imitation of the other 6 accents they didn’t naturally speak.
Participants listened back to some of the recordings made by others, and were asked to guess if they were real or mimicked accents.
Next, the researchers asked 990 UK and Ireland residents to listen to some of the recordings, and guess whether the accents were real or fake.
As participants guessed the identity of multiple different speakers each, the researchers garnered 12,290 responses.
All groups could correctly identify a genuine local accent at a rate better than chance.
But the rates varied a lot geographically. People from Belfast could correctly spot a fellow local between 68-83% of the time.
Conversely, RP speakers could correctly find a fellow RP speaker 51-67% of the time.
The other 5 accent groups lay in between, with people from Glasgow, the North of England, and Dublin, performing nearly as well as those from Belfast, and people from Essex and Bristol more similar to Londoners.
People from Belfast were also best at finding fake local accents, correctly spotting a Belfast mimic 59-76% of the time.
Other groups correctly spotted the fakers roughly between 45-70% of the time.
“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,” says Goodman.
“Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect.”
The researchers point out that study participants were only listening to clips a few seconds long. If they heard speakers for longer, they expect all listeners would get better at accent spotting – but there would probably still be variations in accuracy from region to region.
“I’m interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms,” says Goodman.
“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.”
