I was delighted to read that according to Katie Edwards, her Yorkshire dialect is “alive, kicking and bloody gorgeous” (Gerraway with accentism – I’m proud to speak Yorkshire, 10 June). But how sad that regional dialects create such prejudice, in spite of their linguistic validity. I well remember the high proportion of Jamaican children in my class of “educationally subnormal” or learning disadvantaged pupils, when I began my teaching career in a segregated “special school” in early 1970s Britain. They may not have spoken standard English, but it was very clear that these children were misplaced and misunderstood … an early example of the unfairness meted out to the Windrush generation.
Joan Lewis
St Etienne de Gourgas, France
• The Yorkshire accent certainly lives on in this corner of Buckinghamshire, because of my determination not to change the way I have spoken for 80 years. Like Katie, I was born in Doncaster and educated in Rotherham. I was brought up during the second world war by my mother and grandparents, who all spoke with strong Leeds accents, and was reunited with my Rotherham-born father when he was demobbed.
The first indication I had that my accent might not be “acceptable” to the outside world was when the headmistress of the high school informed my mother that I would make a very good teacher but that she should send me to elocution lessons before I applied to college.
At teacher training college in Norfolk I was told that I must change my accent or I would never get a teaching post in the south of England as “the children would not understand me”. I retorted that I had spoken this way for 18 years and wouldn’t change now. We compromised on my speaking grammatical English (since I was to teach English) and I never looked back. I taught for 32 years in a variety of places in England, including 22 years in Buckinghamshire. No child ever said they could not understand my accent – although my husband (from Southampton) always says that I taught English as a second language.
Margaret Watkins
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
• I enjoyed Katie Edwards’ piece. As a long-exiled southerner I did, though, detect another airing of the widespread northern assumption that the area occupied by “middle- and upper-class southerners”, however that may be defined, is overridingly posh. Spare a thought for we southerners from more lowly backgrounds, who drew the same criticisms of our speech while having to live among all that standard English. I’m from Chatham, in what was industrial north Kent. My friends and neighbours spoke in language sprinkled with glottal stops, using “w” for double-l at the end of words and with smatterings of Romany. We could understand each other but it used to upset English masters at the local grammar.
Richard Bourne
York
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