Sujet 1 - Partie 2 · Bac Anglais, monde contemporain Métropole remplacement 2021

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.