Sujet du Bac Anglais, monde contemporain 2021 · Métropole remplacement

SUJET 1

Le sujet porte sur la thématique « Faire Société ».

Document A

The most attractive accents in the British Isles – mapped

YouGov asked British adults to say whether they think each of the 12 main accents of the British Isles are attractive or unattractive.

[YouGov is a private company conducting opinion polls and market research and operating mainly in the UK.]

Document B

Accent discrimination: you are what you speak

“It is impossible,” writes George Bernard Shaw in his preface to Pygmalion, “for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

Pygmalion was first performed in 1913, and adapted into the brilliant Broadway musical My Fair Lady in 1956, but the play’s views on accents are more relevant than ever. An ITV/ComRes survey of 6000 adults across the UK found that 28% of British people feel discriminated against for their regional accent. Research by the law firm Peninsular concluded that 80% of employers admit to “making discriminating decisions based on regional accents.”

Why is this peculiarly niche 1 form of prejudice so widespread? Well, to start off, a distinction needs to be made between international accent discrimination and accent discrimination within the UK.

I get the pressure to sound “normal.” I moved from India to Canada when I was ten, and within two years I had lost my accent entirely. If you just heard me over the phone, for all intents and purposes I was a bona fide 2 Canuck 3. Being uprooted and transplanted into a different country at such a formative, impressionable age had some profound effects on my priorities – above all, I wanted to assimilate, and the best you can do as a visible minority is talk and act like people around you. [...]

Researcher Alex Baratta, author of a study on teacher accent and identity in schools in the south of England, calls accent discrimination in the UK “the last acceptable form of prejudice.” This might, in part, explain why it’s such a prevalent problem among so many people in the UK.

I’m not privileging one form of discrimination over the other, but I am making a distinction here: where international accent discrimination is fuelled by a predictably racist fear of the other, accent discrimination in the UK is motivated by classism and cultural connotation. That is to say, in Britain, it’s not so much what you sound like – it’s what’s associated with your accent, most notably socioeconomic class and education but also concepts as nebulous as friendliness and morality. The ITV/ComRes poll revealed that the Liverpudlian or Scouse accent was regarded as the least “intelligent,” the least “trustworthy,” and the least “friendly.” Cockney also ranks poorly in “intelligence” and “trustworthiness.”

It’s hardly a coincidence that five of the twenty most deprived areas of England are in Liverpool, or that the Cockney accent is inextricably associated with the working class.

The “Queen’s English”, or received pronunciation (RP), is ranked by far the highest in terms of “intelligence,” while Devon 4 is apparently the most “friendly.” The survey reveals a discrimination that runs along the fault lines of class and the north-south divide – which are to some extent synonymous biases, given that ten of the UK’s twelve most struggling cities are in the north and none are in the south.

The Saint, 10 November 2016

[ The Saint is an independent newspaper based in St Andrews, Scotland]

1 niche: (here) specialised

2 bona fide: real

3 Canuck is an informal word for “Canadian”.

4 Devon is located in the South West of England.

Document C

Partie 1

[16 pts] Prenez connaissance du dossier proposé, composé des documents A, B et C non hiérarchisés, et traitez en anglais le sujet suivant (500 mots maximum):

Taking into account their specificities and viewpoints, say what the documents show about the impact of both regional and foreign accents on how people are perceived by others. Pay attention to the different types of social pressure and discrimination which this creates.

Document A

The most attractive accents in the British Isles – mapped

YouGov asked British adults to say whether they think each of the 12 main accents of the British Isles are attractive or unattractive.

[YouGov is a private company conducting opinion polls and market research and operating mainly in the UK.]

Document B

Accent discrimination: you are what you speak

“It is impossible,” writes George Bernard Shaw in his preface to Pygmalion, “for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

Pygmalion was first performed in 1913, and adapted into the brilliant Broadway musical My Fair Lady in 1956, but the play’s views on accents are more relevant than ever. An ITV/ComRes survey of 6000 adults across the UK found that 28% of British people feel discriminated against for their regional accent. Research by the law firm Peninsular concluded that 80% of employers admit to “making discriminating decisions based on regional accents.”

Why is this peculiarly niche 1 form of prejudice so widespread? Well, to start off, a distinction needs to be made between international accent discrimination and accent discrimination within the UK.

I get the pressure to sound “normal.” I moved from India to Canada when I was ten, and within two years I had lost my accent entirely. If you just heard me over the phone, for all intents and purposes I was a bona fide 2 Canuck 3. Being uprooted and transplanted into a different country at such a formative, impressionable age had some profound effects on my priorities – above all, I wanted to assimilate, and the best you can do as a visible minority is talk and act like people around you. [...]

Researcher Alex Baratta, author of a study on teacher accent and identity in schools in the south of England, calls accent discrimination in the UK “the last acceptable form of prejudice.” This might, in part, explain why it’s such a prevalent problem among so many people in the UK.

I’m not privileging one form of discrimination over the other, but I am making a distinction here: where international accent discrimination is fuelled by a predictably racist fear of the other, accent discrimination in the UK is motivated by classism and cultural connotation. That is to say, in Britain, it’s not so much what you sound like – it’s what’s associated with your accent, most notably socioeconomic class and education but also concepts as nebulous as friendliness and morality. The ITV/ComRes poll revealed that the Liverpudlian or Scouse accent was regarded as the least “intelligent,” the least “trustworthy,” and the least “friendly.” Cockney also ranks poorly in “intelligence” and “trustworthiness.”

It’s hardly a coincidence that five of the twenty most deprived areas of England are in Liverpool, or that the Cockney accent is inextricably associated with the working class.

The “Queen’s English”, or received pronunciation (RP), is ranked by far the highest in terms of “intelligence,” while Devon 4 is apparently the most “friendly.” The survey reveals a discrimination that runs along the fault lines of class and the north-south divide – which are to some extent synonymous biases, given that ten of the UK’s twelve most struggling cities are in the north and none are in the south.

The Saint, 10 November 2016

[ The Saint is an independent newspaper based in St Andrews, Scotland]

1 niche: (here) specialised

2 bona fide: real

3 Canuck is an informal word for “Canadian”.

4 Devon is located in the South West of England.

Document C

Partie 2 [4 pts]

Traduisez en français le passage suivant du document B (l. 1-7):

“It is impossible,” writes George Bernard Shaw in his preface to Pygmalion, “for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

Pygmalion was first performed in 1913, and adapted into the brilliant Broadway musical My Fair Lady in 1956, but the play’s views on accents are more relevant than ever. An ITV/ComRes survey of 6000 adults across the UK found that 28% of British people feel discriminated against for their regional accent.

Document A

Inside Queen Sono, Netflix's First African Original Series

When we think of the spy genre, the icons that come to mind first are often the white,

male masters of espionage, the James Bonds and Jason Bournes. But the new Netflix

series Queen Sono, out Feb. 28, offers its own take on the genre in the platform's first

fully produced African original series.

5 Assuming various aliases, lead character Queen (Pearl Thusi, best known for her roles

in U.S. television series Quantico and the Netflix film Catching Feelings) is a spy

searching for the truth behind her mother's assassination while undertaking a

dangerous assignment requiring her to traverse the African continent. In developing

the narrative, creator Kagiso Lediga sought to blend the history of South Africa with its

10 present-day politics, all set against the backdrop of a femicide crisis and increasing

violence against women. “I thought, how cool would it be to have a woman that

embodies something different, the idea that women can fight back,” he tells TIME.

The series was shot in 37 different locations with an all-African cast and crew, following

Queen on missions in Kenya's hub of Nairobi to an elite bar in Zimbabwe's capital,

15 Harare, as well as her base in Johannesburg. A variety of languages are interspersed

with English throughout the six episodes, including Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Swahili.

Lediga wanted to counter the way in which perceptions of Africa tend to get flattened

by those unfamiliar with its multifaceted reality, and to offer an alternative to

perceptions that focus on the hardships faced by people on the continent. “It's not just

20 about flies on babies suffering from malnutrition,” he says. “There's a vastness of

cultures. It's the second biggest continent, with some 1.3 billion people, and I'm hoping

people will get to appreciate that.” [...]

The legacy of apartheid is also depicted through the disparities in South Africa's living

standards; the country has one of the highest inequality rates in the world owing to the

25 legacy of apartheid. [...] “It's important to show the contemporariness of the African

narrative,” Lediga says. “Telling a story like this makes it urgent, makes it present.”

www.time.com, 3 March 2020

Document B

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to

call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern

Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four

is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British

5 and American children's books.

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories

in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote

exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed,

they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how

10 lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I

lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate

mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British

books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.

15 (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste

ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the

face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which

characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had

20 to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally

identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many

of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe 1 and Camara Laye 2, I went through a mental

shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color

25 of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I

started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination.

They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did

not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African

30 writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

Chimamanda NGOZI ADICHIE, extract from a speech at TEDGlobal, 2009

1 a Nigerian author

2 a Guinean author

Document C

[Paapa Essiedu is a British actor whose family came from Ghana. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012. He is the first black actor to star as Hamlet with the RSC.]

SUJET 2

Le sujet porte sur la thématique « Relation au monde ».

Partie 1 (16 pts)

Prenez connaissance du dossier proposé, composé des documents A, B et C non hiérarchisés, et traitez en anglais le sujet suivant (500 mots maximum):

Taking into account their specificities, say what the documents reveal about the capacity of art to give voice to diversity and still speak to everyone.

Document A

Inside Queen Sono, Netflix's First African Original Series

When we think of the spy genre, the icons that come to mind first are often the white,

male masters of espionage, the James Bonds and Jason Bournes. But the new Netflix

series Queen Sono, out Feb. 28, offers its own take on the genre in the platform's first

fully produced African original series.

5 Assuming various aliases, lead character Queen (Pearl Thusi, best known for her roles

in U.S. television series Quantico and the Netflix film Catching Feelings) is a spy

searching for the truth behind her mother's assassination while undertaking a

dangerous assignment requiring her to traverse the African continent. In developing

the narrative, creator Kagiso Lediga sought to blend the history of South Africa with its

10 present-day politics, all set against the backdrop of a femicide crisis and increasing

violence against women. “I thought, how cool would it be to have a woman that

embodies something different, the idea that women can fight back,” he tells TIME.

The series was shot in 37 different locations with an all-African cast and crew, following

Queen on missions in Kenya's hub of Nairobi to an elite bar in Zimbabwe's capital,

15 Harare, as well as her base in Johannesburg. A variety of languages are interspersed

with English throughout the six episodes, including Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Swahili.

Lediga wanted to counter the way in which perceptions of Africa tend to get flattened

by those unfamiliar with its multifaceted reality, and to offer an alternative to

perceptions that focus on the hardships faced by people on the continent. “It's not just

20 about flies on babies suffering from malnutrition,” he says. “There's a vastness of

cultures. It's the second biggest continent, with some 1.3 billion people, and I'm hoping

people will get to appreciate that.” [...]

The legacy of apartheid is also depicted through the disparities in South Africa's living

standards; the country has one of the highest inequality rates in the world owing to the

25 legacy of apartheid. [...] “It's important to show the contemporariness of the African

narrative,” Lediga says. “Telling a story like this makes it urgent, makes it present.”

www.time.com, 3 March 2020

Document B

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to

call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern

Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four

is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British

5 and American children's books.

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories

in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote

exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed,

they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how

10 lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I

lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate

mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British

books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.

15 (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste

ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the

face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which

characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had

20 to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally

identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many

of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe 1 and Camara Laye 2, I went through a mental

shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color

25 of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I

started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination.

They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did

not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African

30 writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

Chimamanda NGOZI ADICHIE, extract from a speech at TEDGlobal, 2009

1 a Nigerian author

2 a Guinean author

Document C

[Paapa Essiedu is a British actor whose family came from Ghana. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012. He is the first black actor to star as Hamlet with the RSC.]

Partie 2 [4 pts]

Traduisez en français le passage suivant du document B (l. 24-30):

I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.