If there’s a man who knows what “mockney” Miliband is going through right now, it’s Steve McClaren.
The former England football manager’s faux Dutch accent in an interview recorded while in charge of FC Twente is one of the most hilarious examples of how we pick up accents depending on context – and whether we’re trying to be liked or accepted.
But it’s actually rather common. Joey Barton, the footballer, put on a French accent at a press conference in Marseille. And Oprah Winfrey has been criticised for copying the accents of her guests, adopting previously unheard southern vowels.
Most of us will have experienced it, lessening or emphasising our regional accents or slang depending on the social situation.
So for linguistic psychologists, it’s no surprise to see Miliband swap his bland north London speech for an estuary twang during his interview with Russell Brand, complete with street-style hand gestures. “Yeah, we gotta deal with that. You gotta do it,” he puffed, as he promised to tackle global corporate tax avoidance.
It’s a sign that he really wants to get on the same level as Brand, and presumably with his 9.5 million Twitter followers, and emphasise their common ground – even subconsciously.
The phenomenon is called communication accommodation theory. It is generally unintentional and happens in many languages.
First identified by the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Prof Howard Giles, the theory is that “when people interact they adjust their speech, their vocal patterns and their gestures, to accommodate to others”.
The researchers who developed the theory argue that speech is one of the numerous ways to express membership of a group; people show convergence in accent or method of speech to “signal a salient group distinctiveness, so as to reinforce a social identity”.
So Miliband’s south-eastern accent akin to that of Brand’s hometown of Grays in Essex betrays that he really wants them to get along.
“Most human beings have a desire to be liked by the person they are talking to,” said Prof Karen Douglas, of the University of Kent’s social psychology department. “The extent of that varies quite a bit depending on the personality, but if you monitor a conversation between two people, the accents will often start to converge and begin to sound more similar.
“If I speak to an Australian, my Australian accent might start to get stronger, or lessen when I’m speaking to an English person. It’s usually done completely unconsciously as a way of affiliating.”
Not only can it be subconscious, people actually pick up when their conversation partner doesn’t mimic them in some way, said University College London’s speech expert Dr Mark Huckvale. “If you greet someone with a casual, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ you’d find it weird if they came back very stilted and formal,” he said.
It can work both ways, however. “People may try to distance themselves from a person they don’t like, or want to maintain social difference from, through how they speak,” Douglas said. “They might try to sound posher, for example, though that would have been a poor move for Ed Miliband.”
Douglas said she would be interested to observe how Miliband’s accent changes over the course of his 35-minute chat with Brand, which will be edited into an eight-minute clip and is expected to be published online on Wednesday.
“Often the adopted accent gets stronger the longer the conversation goes on, so it would be interesting to hear if he starts off speaking like Brand or whether it comes later,” she said.
Of course, it’s always possible that Miliband’s doing it on purpose, said Huckvale. “Usually you can pick up whether someone is deliberately faking it, because if someone is trying to put on hip-hop street slang for example, it usually sounds a bit ‘Oh dad!’” he said. “But because it can happen so easily subconsciously too, you can never be totally sure.”
