“Divn’t gan al posh!” Accentism at Cambridge

‘Divn’t gan al posh’ is a phrase that was said to me in the local, after sharing the news that I had received an offer to Cambridge. The irony is, I will never be posh to those in Cambridge. It is no secret that Cambridge is a place of elongated vowels and second homes, and that you have to sound ‘Cambridge’ enough to fit in. In a space dominated by Received Pronunciation, my Geordie accent makes me stick out like a sore thumb.

The melodic Geordie accent is rooted in its industrial past of coal mining and shipbuilding, and is inseparable from its working class heritage. Every Geordie is proud to be a Geordie but, in Cambridge, this sing-songy accent entails a whole host of disadvantages.

It’s hardly news that Cambridge has long been a class-exclusive space. For most of its existence, working class people weren’t considered worthy candidates – and certainly not working class Geordies. The University’s application statistics show that in 2022, almost half of applications from UK students were from London and the south east, with only 2.1% from the north east. This meant that applicants from London and the south east accounted for 51% of the new cohort. Seeing these statistics materialise when I arrived here was a shocking reality. Hearing a Geordie accent in Cambridge is like your Mam telling you you’re having a ‘chippy tea’…extremely rare but electrifying.

Realising the difficulty I would have getting through the front door based on these statistics, I panicked. I softened my accent for interviews because of the fear that sounding ‘too Geordie’ would lead to a perception that I was unprofessional, or even less intelligent. It’s a gut-punching thing, realising you have to put on a ‘phone voice’ to make sure you’re taken seriously by those assessing your potential. And once I arrived, I realised that that voice was here to stay.

When receiving my offer, I thought I had the golden ticket to social mobility. I arrived in Cambridge bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with an immense pride for the place that shaped me. Moving into a new city, with new people, in such a prestigious institution is an anxiety-inducing event. Then, to add insult to injury, people act like you’re speaking a foreign language.

Even amongst my peers, my accent is a siren announcing my difference. The dialectical quirks of the Geordie accent are often playfully mocked. Homely phrases like ‘wey aye’, ‘howay man’, and ‘a divvina’ are echoed back at me with laughter. Trust me, I get it, they’re funny little phrases; but these interactions just hammer home how out of place someone of my background is here. A fellow Geordie, at Jesus College, reiterated these feelings when he confided that in first year, when he would ask what London slang meant, he was met with ridicule. We both laugh it off now, but deep down we are all too aware that we are a square peg in a round hole.

There are pockets of relief that do need some recognition though. The beloved Northern society can act as a home away from home to listen to some broad vowels and glottal stops. I remember attending my first pub crawl, as a Fresher, and feeling an immense sense of relief at finally being in a room with people who had a similar experience with their accent in Cambridge. The congenial atmosphere was a gentle reminder that I wasn’t an alien at the university. Outside of those spaces, however, many of us spend our days over-enunciating for supervisors, porters, and even friends, just to make sure we’re understood.

Despite the Geordie accent being named the ‘most attractive accent in England’ in 2008 – I know I’m rinsing it – its working class associations don’t exactly endear it to Cambridge norms. Since it doesn’t abide by the rulebook of Received Pronunciation, it gets quietly branded as ‘informal’, ‘unacademic’, or simply ‘unprofessional’. It acts as an inescapable marker of my social position. At Matriculation dinner, I caught myself shrinking into silence because academics struggled to understand me. After endlessly repeating myself, I eventually just stopped talking. This became a theme around academics for me. In supervisions, I kept my additions short and sweet when I knew they were struggling to understand me. Even these short bursts of participation were punctuated by over-enunciation and that dreaded ‘phone voice’. It is tiresome to uphold, and being quiet is often the easier option.

The identity awkwardness doesn’t stop when term ends. Back home, I’m told I’ve gone ‘al posh’. It becomes increasingly difficult to shake off the habit of over-enunciating to be understood. At university I’m too Geordie; at home I’m not Geordie enough. I end up existing in a strange class identity limbo, where I am not working class enough for home anymore, and not quite posh enough to fluently navigate a space like Cambridge. In other words, vacations begin to act as dislocations.

The fact of the matter is that these issues do not end after I get my degree either. The majority of the employment opportunities available to me will be in London, where the same biases will likely play out in slightly different accents (see what I did there). In a corporate world where job applications are often accompanied by a video interview monitored by AI, it’s fair to say this barrier to success will not dissolve on graduation day.

I am proud of my roots, and I am proud of this sing-songy accent. I just hope that Cambridge, and my post-graduate life, does not force me to ‘gan al posh’.

Edited by Charlie Windle