Accents

I got into trouble the other day when I said I could tell someone was Muslim by their accent

I was talking about one specific person. I did not mean that any & every Muslim in the world is instantly identifiable by their voice

Correlation does not prove causation. So the fact that there are people in England who speak in a particular accent and happen to be Muslim does not mean that their religion is the causal explanation

It is just a coincidence of history & the way that language & migration work. The people who moved to work in the textile areas of Lancashire & Yorkshire brought their accents with them from the sub-continent. These then blended with the local accents in a particular way which language experts could explain. Their children learned to speak with their own mixture of the two, reflecting more of the accent of the area in which they were born, but still identifiably slightly different

There used to be a distinctive Jewish accent which you hear less these days. In popular culture it became familiar through the appearances on tv of actors such as Alfred Marks, Warren Mitchell and Miriam Karlin. A blend of Eastern Europe & the East End

One of the most intriguing blended accents which I ever heard belonged to an octogenarian who had moved from Barbados to South Yorkshire to work down the mines during WWI (he was being interviewed for a programme about the Comedian Charlie Williams). Even after half a century he retained that distinctive Bajan lilt behind the flat Yorkshire vowels

Many people think that their own accent has not changed, particularly if they still live in the area in which they were born. This may well be true in some cases (how could we prove it one way or another?), but it is instructive to hear the voices of broadcasters in recordings made as little as 10 years ago – Paxman, Humphrys, Buerk – have all changed a little, but noticeably