Open Editor's Digest for free
Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a researcher based at the University of Cambridge and author of the upcoming book Invisible Competitors: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World.
The way people talk can be more important than what they say. Ukrainian soldiers Use specific phonemes – the spoken parts of words – that Russian speakers encounter in order to distinguish between friends and enemies. It is interesting to note that the story of the Bible Shibboleth echoes Same idea: Thousands of years ago, a victorious tribe slaughtered the vanquished, finding only those who could say “sibolit” — a trait that, according to the Bible, led to the deaths of more than 40,000 people.
Identifying a person's social origins through language is an ancient practice, and highlights how important small linguistic differences are in notions of community and identity. This is the result of the way we evolved. Throughout history, we have needed to carefully place our trust in strangers: bias toward those who look or sound like us, and against those who seem different.
Today we often joke about the signs that make up the dialects of languages around the world. We use them in our daily social relationships to learn something about the people we meet. However, when there is tension between groups, these signs can quickly become dangerous – reigniting our tribal instincts.
These forces have lasting power, just like us Found in a research project I drove in Cambridge. We asked 1,000 people from across the UK and Ireland to guess whether someone was faking one of seven regional accents. They were pretty good at it, finding cheating in about two-thirds of the cases regardless of where the listener was from or the wrong accent.
Interestingly, this varied across regions: people from places that had historical cultural tensions with the south of the UK were better at telling if someone was faking a listener's accent. For example, someone from Belfast could speak with a fake Belfast accent about 75 percent of the time, while someone speaking what is considered standard British English was right just over half the time.
Many people have wondered about this regional difference: why should people from Belfast or Glasgow be better at spotting scams than those from the south of England? I think the answer lies in the tribalism we have evolved to display, for better and for worse. (Sometimes in Belfast, as in Ukraine today, using the wrong dialect had disastrous consequences.) Historical tensions within and between cultural groups have almost certainly led to an increased emphasis on social identity, and an increasing need to be able to tell friends about who they are. Enemies. Tribalism comes back when people need it.
But accents also explain how trust is formed between people, and serve as the logos by which we classify them.
How they are interpreted can even influence policy, for example through linguistic assessment to determine origin, which governments use Including in the United Kingdom. For this purpose, trained linguists interview a person seeking asylum to determine whether he is from Syria, for example, and not from Iraq. A wrong move can lead to deportation – and using the test indicates how speech patterns affect every level of our lives. This is despite questions about whether or not it actually works Linguistic patterns are often very complex For anyone except the original listener to effectively discriminate.
Accents are aspects of human communication, and in turn are the means by which we can be honest or deceive. Mafia members sometimes hide their accents dangerously in phone conversations to associate themselves with areas of Sicily known to be more dangerous, says sociologist Diego Gambetta, who specializes in Italy's criminal underworld. Often, people unconsciously change their accents to reflect the accents of the people around them — an example of what sociolinguists call “programmatic switching,” which can help build social relationships.
The uses of these signals are varied and fluid, but they can have serious effects on both the speaker and the listener. Our accents can tell others about our social identity, demonstrate our authenticity (or lack thereof), and enable us to distinguish between friends and enemies.
However, today, with tribal signals becoming increasingly powerful across the political spectrum, we must remember that it is in the interest of extremists around the world to keep people divided by markers of belonging – and to focus on the signals that divide us rather than the ideas that unite us. . So when you hear a different accent next time, don't look at it as a break. Take the opportunity to engage with someone new.
