A FEW days ago, the challenger in Scotland’s most marginal seat stood where the River Leven drains out of Loch Lomond and gave a short video interview.
His message was boilerplate, one he must have repeated countless times. But the SNP’s Dumbarton candidate, Toni Giugliano, took his time to find words. He was flicking his political stump speech from English to Italian, for Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper. And as he did so he left a faint but unmistakable trail of Scottish sounds in his native language.
Born in Liguria, but brought up in Dunbartonshire, Mr Giugliano has an accent. We all do.
His opponent, Labour’s half-Portuguese Hong Kong-born Jackie Baillie, has lived in the constituency for decades.
Her treacly voice mixes traces of Scottish with long gliding vowels, English diphthongs, which tell a story of a peripatetic youth.
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This election has been a festival not just of democracy, but of language. Big political campaigns always are. Because during them broadcasters are forced out in to communities, pushing microphones and cameras under our noses and asking us to talk. And talk we do. In our own voices, and sometimes, our own dialects and languages. The result – as we hear from Argyll fishermen, Polish migrants, Mearns farmers, Edinburgh bankers or Lanarkshire call centre workers – is a chorus of diverse, wonderful accents.
And not just in English. This campaign, for the first time, has seen all foreign nationals living in Scotland getting the vote. That has quietly inspired a linguistic revolution. Candidates are asking people to vote for them in other languages.
Aside from Mr Giugliano’s Italian video, SNP politicians alone have prepared clips in German, French, Spanish and Chinese. Closer to home, the Tories – some of whose more chauvinistic base can be hostile to indigenous languages – have made a party political broadcast in Gaelic.
Accents: sometimes they reflect who we are, where we have been; sometimes they signpost who we want to be; where we want to go. But they always say as much about us as our words, whether we like it or not. They map us, vocally.
They can also provoke surprisingly strong emotional responses, both positive and negative. Some of us struggle to hide our prejudice when we hear the cut-glass RP of Tory frontbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg or the working-class Glaswegian of SNP MP Mhairi Black. Both have been abused over how they speak. Polar opposites politically, they have, it is said, found common ground on this prejudice.
Politicians, even the less able ones, are usually too savvy to indulge in what socio-linguists call “accentism’, bigotry based on speech. There is not much to be gained, after all, by insulting voters, unless you are aiming for a very small demographic.
The last weekend of this year’s campaign, however, featured exactly this kind of election clanger. George Galloway, a Kremlin TV host and de-facto leader of a fringe British nationalist electoral slate, took to Twitter to ask if the mission of BBC Scotland was to “make us look and sound like a nation of Janey Godley and Rab C Nesbits” before adding the he was “watching jakeys”.
Ms Godley is a writer, comedian and an online columnist for The Herald. She has been subjected to sustained online harassment for several years, often from political unionists, some of whom now support Mr Galloway.
She speaks English with a pretty routine Glasgow accent and occasionally drifts in to a broader Scots. She was eloquent enough to fight her own corner, mocking the hapless, gaffe-prone Mr Galloway. He responded by publishing faked tweets falsely accusing Ms Godley of being a racist. He had to apologise. There was only one loser in this Twitter spat.
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The ugly little episode was hardly illuminating for those who follow politics. But for socio-linguists, like Rob Drummond of Manchester Metropolitan University, it was “fascinating”.
“George Galloway is embodying some well-worn stereotypes regarding the relationship between accent, identity, social class, and even character,” the academic said. “It’s an unusual stance to take during elections, as surely it simply serves to alienate significant sections of the population.
“He is explicitly putting some accents on a higher-status-level than others, and seems to be accusing BBC Scotland of knowingly using this hierarchy to undermine the perception of Scotland from outside. He clearly sees one accent as representing the underclass, and another accent as representing the elite.”
Politicians may not often punch down. But they sometimes, Mr Drummond says, punch up, referring to “posh" Etonians. “This is, of course, still an example of accent prejudice, but arguably it is happening in the direction where the imbalance of power makes it less recognisable as such,” he says.
He and his colleagues have been cataloguing examples of accentism, as the BBC and other TV and radio channels widen the range of speech they broadcast.
They have good news. “There is still a long way to go, but there are perhaps signs that things are changing,” Mr Drummond explains. “There are suggestions that younger people do not hold the same stereotypes and attitudes towards particular accents as older people. And there is clearly a lot more diversity within broadcasting as a whole than there was 30 or 40 years ago. Also, there is simply so much more voice media around than there was [more TV, podcasts, social media, youtube etc]. Hopefully, all this exposure will have an effect.”
This was a TikTok election, a campaign when soundbites were not just for the evening TV news, and when everybody could have their say – out loud, recorded for posterity.
There are still those who struggle with linguistic diversity, who think more variety makes less sense, who yearn for the certainty of a prestige dialect or accent, whether it is RP or standard Scottish English (SSE). But standardisation means less understanding, not more. It loses us so much nuance, so much identity; so much poetry of place. Only speaking SSE or RP is like only painting in monochrome. It’s dull.
Later today we will find out who voters in Dumbarton have chosen as their voice, Mr Giugliano or Ms Baillie. Either way it will be somebody whose speech tells a story. We should respect that, 129 times over, for every seat in Holyrood.
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