Are Scottish accents really more aggressive? A linguist explains

Can your accent make you sound aggressive? Exeter City football manager Gary Caldwell thinks so – he blamed his Scottish accent for his being sent off the pitch for the second time this season.

After receiving a red card for his reaction after a late goal was disallowed for handball, Caldwell said: “I didn’t swear, I didn’t run, in my opinion I wasn’t aggressive. My accent and my Scottishness is aggressive, but yeah, I got sent off for that.”

Caldwell is not the first to feel his Scottish accent has led to him being treated unfairly. Scottish comedian Fern Brady described herself as “an intelligent woman trapped in a Scottish accent”. She says she became most aware of her accent when she moved to southern England and she felt people looked at her as if “a dog was barking at them”.

There are, of course, many different Scottish accents, even if previous research has found that English people tend to be very bad at identifying them as anything more precise than “Scottish”. But there is a stereotype that Scottish accents sound aggressive or at least tough.

It is no coincidence that swamp-dwelling Shrek has a Scottish accent. Producers can use an accent as shorthand to tell us the sort of person (or ogre) that a character is, in this case that Shrek is hardy and grouchy, but also warm and salt of the earth.

Many presume that Scottish accents sound harsh or, as they are often unfortunately characterised, gruff because of some inherent property: the throaty, fricative sound in loch, the striking glottal stop for “t” as in Fern Brady’s pronunciation of Scottish and the audible r’s in words like car.

None of these pronunciations are unique to Scottish accents. But you would certainly not hear them in standard southern British English, an accent rooted in south-east England which many perceive as prestigious or neutral.

In reality, the way we feel about an accent tells us less about its integral properties and much more about the stereotypes of the people who speak it.

In my research I have found that in south-east England, when reading aloud the same sentence, lower-working-class people were judged to be on average 14% less intelligent, 4% less friendly and 5% less trustworthy than upper-middle-class people.

People from ethnic minority backgrounds were evaluated as 5% less intelligent than white people, regardless of class. Accent prejudice is actually a smokescreen for other forms of prejudice.

The consequences of accent prejudice

We have no way of knowing, but perhaps if Caldwell spoke standard southern British English, he could have protested the disallowed goal without being sent off.

But – sorry, football fans – the decisions made based on a person’s accent can have much graver consequences than what team wins a match. A person’s accent can advantage or disadvantage them in several ways, including in job recruitment and the criminal justice system.

Research has found that speakers of standard southern British English are seen as more suitable candidates in mock job interviews to be a trainee solicitor than those who speak either multicultural London English or estuary English (both working-class southern accents).

They are also seen as less likely to commit various crimes, particularly compared to people from Liverpool or Bradford.

It is no coincidence that speakers of standard southern British English tend to be unscathed by accent bias. Research spanning 50 years has found that it is the British accent judged most favourably, especially as being prestigious. In contrast, the accents of urban industrialised areas in Britain tend to receive the harshest evaluations.

It is true that regional accents are sometimes (though not always) seen as chummy. But regional accents generally do not lead to a person being seen as competent, astute or like the people who you would want to run your business or your country – even if they would be a right laugh at the Christmas party.

Gender can also play a role in accent perception. If a female football manager – though there are currently none in English men’s professional football – with a Scottish accent had protested a referee’s decision, she would likely fare even worse than Caldwell. Women who speak with regional accents tend to be judged more harshly and labelled with more negative character traits than men.

For example, a 2020 study by linguist Roy Alderton found gender differences in how teenagers in southern England were judged based on their accent.

Regardless of gender, the teenagers with high rates of glottal stops in place of “t” were judged as sounding chavvy – a pejorative used to label someone thought to have low education and social class. The girl with high rates of glottal stops was additionally judged as annoying and uneducated, while the boy was thought to sound like a lad – not the most crushing insult for a teenage boy.

Read more: The Traitors: how trustworthy is a Welsh accent? A sociolinguist explains

When a person is treated a certain way because of their accent, they are actually being treated this way because of their race, class, gender, where they are from or something else fundamental to who they are.

Caldwell suggested he needs to become more “Englified” because of the way he is judged based on his Scottish accent. Of course, that is not something he should have to do. No-one should have to change their accent and forsake who they are.

Instead, we should challenge in ourselves and others the judgements and decisions we make based on a person’s accent – what linguists call accentism. Acknowledging and tackling accentism is one part of creating a level playing field in football and all other walks of life.

Amanda Cole is affiliated with The Accentism Project which she runs along with Dr Rob Drummond to raise awareness and challenge accentism.