Even the closest shall cause each other pain. For there is nothing closer than the tongue and the teeth, and yet one sometimes bites the other unintentionally.
Somali word play
In the summer of 2002, when I was eighteen, I was homeless for a year. I had left school, and, since I was no longer in full-time education, I had become eligible to pay council tax: something we didn’t have a hope of affording. As a result, I ended up at Centrepoint in Soho, the hostel for young homeless people. At the time, the system was this: you had a bed for the first nine nights, but you had to use that time to secure your next hostel, which meant spending your early mornings ringing around anywhere that might have a spare bed, trying to persuade them that they should give it to you. Your next hostel would allow you to stay for two weeks, which you had to spend securing the next hostel, which would be for six months, and so on. The stakes were high: if you couldn’t secure somewhere, you’d be faced with the choice of a night on the streets, or returning to the situation that you’d left behind.
Maybe, to you, this doesn’t sound very difficult – it’s only making a few phone calls, after all. But it was immediately clear to me that many of the young people I shared Centrepoint with were struggling. Their stories varied – one person had been thrown out by a parent who believed they were possessed, another was escaping a violent home, someone else was fleeing a forced marriage – but the themes remained the same: poverty, violence, danger and trauma. Phoning the hostels meant finding the numbers, calling round, not being put off, telling a persuasive story about why it should be you who gets the bed, and insisting, calling back, arguing your corner, winning people round. Many of these young people lacked the confidence to make the calls in the first place, or to insist that they should be considered, or they couldn’t explain why they needed the bed in a way that made sense to the busy people on the other end of the phone. Despite the fact that they were so vulnerable, they weren’t getting anywhere.
So, once I had sorted out my own accommodation, I started calling on behalf of other people. I sat down with them, talked with them, worked out what to say about their particular situation, and then hit the phones. It gave me pride and purpose to help others like me. It was the first time I’d ever done something like this, but somehow, it worked: everyone got a bed. And I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of language, the often random advantages that dictate who gets listened to and who gets ignored – and the power of knowing how to use your voice effectively.
Although it might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the subject, I believe passionately that language skills are critical to social mobility. It is easy, as I’ve said, to see social mobility in terms of numbers: funding, budgets, quotas, percentages and income gaps. But that’s only half the story, and while the other half is less easy to define or quantify, it’s just as important. The effective use of language comes into this category: you can have the skills or raw talent, you can be the most deserving, the most qualified, but if you can’t articulate what you want to yourself or to others, if you can’t connect with people and persuade them to offer you the things that you need, if you can’t argue your way on to that very first rung of the ladder, the bed for the night, it’s not going to count for much.
* * *
Partly, this conviction comes from my own experience: it is very hard to explain to anyone who does not speak it the true power, nuance, versatility and range of the Somali language. The language of my ancestors, one of two languages I was exposed to as soon as I could speak, is meant to be spoken (it was only written down in 1972),1 and is at its best in reciting poetry.2 It is also extraordinarily hard to learn: the Foreign Services Institute, run by the US State Department, ranks it at Category 2 for difficulty, but I would argue that it deserves a place in Category 3, with Arabic, Chinese and Korean.3 It has – just for a start – all the guttural sounds of Arabic, irregular plurals like German, and completely unfamiliar prepositions, as well as being a tonal language like Mandarin (though Somali has only a high and a low tone).
In spite of all this, Somalis love to talk, and delight in conversation, debate, poetry, aphorisms; as my friend Safia Aidid put it in a recent article, ‘language is the essence of Somali society … they talk in the nomadic countryside as they set up camp or water their camels; they talk when they encounter one another on journeys, at trading posts, at wells; they talk in huts and in houses, while resting away from the sun during its most intense hours’ and anywhere else they find themselves.4 This is just as true among Somalis in the diaspora (although admittedly it’s an art form that remains firmly in the domain of the older generation, and those being raised by grandmothers). The Somali language is above all a language of persuasion: it’s rare that you’ll have a conversation with a Somali without feeling like they’re attempting to really convince you of something. Making the simplest point requires a carefully crafted story, right for the moment, and above all memorable.
This bleeds into the everyday, making language an integral part of family life. When my siblings and I fought as children, my grandmother would never simply tell us to shut up and behave. Instead, she’d ask us to look at our right hands. Our father, her son, left behind five children, did he not, comes the question. Just observe those fingers, she’d add; is any finger equal to or the same as the other? Each has a differently sized and shaped nail, creases, purpose, length, form, etc. – but ultimately all make up the right hand (not the left!) – correct? Each has a specific role, whether you’re holding a pen, performing a handshake, holding the keys, while in a different combination you may dial a call. No single finger is ‘better’ than the other, she adds. And then comes the message, unexpectedly; so when will you grow up and accept that you’re all one but different; the same blood but different people?
I would wonder to myself; if we were six or four children, would the five fingers analogy have worked? How else would she have made the same point? Has she used it before? This is the essence of the Somali language; a language that relied for centuries on the oral tradition and on memory, on stories, poetry, alliteration and imagery. Quick retorts are critical, too: I would joke with her, holding up her hand, ‘Okay, does that make me the skinny and tall middle finger; and Ali the thumb because he’s fat?’ Her eyes squinting, she clenches her fist and replies, ‘this hand becomes a fist that can also land a blow to your face…’ And on it goes.
Growing up speaking Somali has given me a profound sense of the importance of language. But it was also a message imparted through our experience of the world: learning languages was simply something my family did – partly to survive in the various places we found ourselves, but also for the sheer pleasure of it. My father didn’t have to learn the different languages of the lands he criss-crossed in his long-haul truck. But he did, because he knew that there’s no better way to communicate with someone than in their own tongue; as he used to say, a few words said to someone in their own language is worth far more than whole sentences in a foreign language.
If my father’s languages formed a geography of the places he’d been, mine map my own history. I grew up bilingual in Somali and Swahili (with a smattering of English, mainly picked up from the movies). When we moved to England, I found myself suddenly struggling, attending school in a language I didn’t speak. When I did learn English, it was a form known as ‘Multicultural London English’, the language of black inner-city London in the 1990s, a society full of rich immigrant experience, influenced by Jamaican patois and grime music, marinated in the cultures of the South Asian Muslims and the African and Caribbean cultures of my corner of Brent, North West London. When I did an Erasmus year as part of my degree and learned French, it was a marker of the opportunities that were opening up in front of me. And, as luck would have it,5 I find myself today making a career out of speaking persuasively in the archaic and formalised language of the law courts. I still speak all these languages. On any given day, I might begin with a visit to my grandmother, where I listen intently as she waxes lyrical in Somali proverbs, head into court for a hearing (‘My Lord, I am loath to interrupt my learned friend mid-flow but would he care to continue reading the rest of the passage …’), go to the BBC for a meeting (‘Before we touch base, let’s make sure we’ve engaged the key stakeholders’), and then meet my young cousin back in Wembley (‘Yo fam, wha’ you saying do’?).
But the biggest role that language has played in my life has been in helping me get to this point in the first place. Language pops up everywhere in relation to social mobility, from hiring practices to university entrance to mental health and identity. I’ve seen for myself the many ways in which languages impact on success and happiness. As a recent immigrant, not speaking the language disrupted my education, isolated me and undermined my confidence. I watched as Somali adults struggled to learn English at all, or, like my grandmother, made a conscious decision to concentrate on continuing to speak to us in Somali, rather than make any real effort to learn English. (Her reasoning was that at least if we spoke Somali we could continue the legacy of our history, while English, for her, would not be useful, given that she ‘wouldn’t be around for long’.) I have seen how this made life difficult for the adults in our lives, stopping them from being able to effectively communicate, especially when it came to dealing with authority figures and government departments. I saw how the ambitions of my friends and siblings were shaped and limited by the fact that they never heard anyone in authority speak like them. And I saw how, by changing how I communicated, I could change the way that people responded to me. Being able to identify what you need at a critical point in your life, or what kind of ambition will shape your future, means little if you can’t inspire confidence in others to help you, to guide you, to believe in your vision, and to want to be part of your story.
* * *
Fluency, articulacy, a wide vocabulary, the ability to communicate – these are all important skills, regardless of who you are and what you’re doing. But they don’t belong to any particular group of people or way of speaking, though, as we will see, there is an association between language development and socio-economic status. However, it is also abundantly clear that in modern Britain language is not a neutral thing: instead, it is part of a dense network of perception and interpretation, and what you sound like is determined not only by what sounds leave your mouth, but also by the mindset and preconceptions of the person listening to you. All too often, this means that speech is divided into categories of right or wrong, which are based on prejudice but have a very real effect nonetheless: your accent, your choice of words, your register can all put you on the wrong side of a rigid interpretation of what a clever person, a professional person, or an important person sounds like.
Before I get on to the fraught nature of the relationship between language and class, one very important thing should be noted: language skills are not shared out equally in our society. In Chapter 1, I mentioned the ‘language gap’,6 which is present in young children and is one of the reasons that children from privileged backgrounds are eighteen months ahead of their poorer peers even before they start school. But poor children aren’t just doing badly relative to better-off children: in deprived areas of the country 50 per cent of children and young people might have what are loosely grouped under the term ‘Special Communication Language Needs’,7 an umbrella term that covers everything from a poor vocabulary to stuttering to basic issues of understanding, such as not knowing what a question is.8 Poor language skills in childhood are closely linked with difficulties in adulthood: 60 per cent of young offenders struggle with it, and having a limited vocabulary as a child doubles your likelihood of being unemployed in adulthood.9 It’s not hard to understand why: problems with language undermine a child’s ability to learn for obvious reasons, but not being able to express yourself is itself intensely frustrating, leading to behavioural problems that affect not just children’s education but their relationships and happiness.10
But even children who don’t have a SCLN are let down in language terms. Schools spend a vast amount of time developing reading and writing skills, but far less is devoted to the equally important skill of verbal communication. We are well aware of the devastating effect that illiteracy has on life opportunities, but the fact that many children leave school without any proficiency in spoken language, or oracy, seems not to trouble us. Perhaps because the idea that there’s a ‘right way to speak’ is so loaded, spoken language remains a forgotten corner of the curriculum, with serious consequences for children from poor backgrounds. By contrast, private schools (and well-resourced state schools and grammars) take oracy extremely seriously, nourishing it through drama, debating, and other forms of public speaking that boost confidence and improve articulacy. In their systematic demolishing of the private school system, Engines of Privilege, Francis Green and David Kynaston point out that the number of theatres in London private schools is fifty-nine: significantly more than in the West End.11
Precisely why poor children struggle with oracy is a complicated question. Children who – like my siblings and I – are recent immigrants or refugees face particular problems: language barriers, the disturbance of their family and education, and perhaps the legacy of traumatic things they have seen or experienced. Problems with language can emerge from surprising, devastating directions. When Shukri, Hamdi, Ali and I were finally reunited with my mother, after a separation of several years, we’d forgotten most of our Swahili and Somali, and she didn’t speak any English. Suddenly, we not only had to get to know our mother again – we had to do it across a significant language barrier. Something that should have been a joyful reunion, a step on the path to stability and order, became instead destabilising and alienating. For other young children, having to suddenly learn a new language can disrupt their attempts to master their first language, leading to a lack of total fluency in both, and there’s also the problem of engaging with a state apparatus that doesn’t understand you. If teachers or health workers don’t share a child’s first language,12 it’s hard for them to pick up any existing problems, while well-meaning attempts to help a community can founder on basic misunderstandings: my old relatives were puzzled to receive health pamphlets from the NHS printed in Somali, a language they all spoke but which very few in that generation were able to read.
But the much larger group is children born in England and speaking English as their first language, and they are also the victims of a lack of knowledge. According to a ten-year follow-up to the Bercow Report into speech disorders among young people, ‘more than half of young children in school are not having their needs identified’ because of a lack of training and understanding among those who should be picking it up. Whether or not you’re able to access help and support is a postcode lottery, meaning that children are at the mercy of the kind of geographical disadvantage we discussed in the education chapter. Swingeing cuts to the number of health visitors means that early signs of language delay aren’t necessarily picked up till later, and parents may face long waits to access help if they don’t have the resources to go private.13
That’s diagnosis and treatment. But children’s language development is also shaped by their home lives. According to the Marmot report, ‘parental involvement in their child’s reading has been found to be the most important determinant of language and emergent literacy’, with children doing best when experiencing both ‘high levels of parental warmth’ and ‘high levels of supervision’. Middle-class parents don’t have a monopoly on warmth – but, as we saw from Annette Lareau’s research in Chapter 1, they have both the resources and the motivation to closely supervise their children’s development. In her study, middle-class parents involved their children in discussion and encouraged them to share their own experiences and opinions, giving them a positive experience of speaking and being listened to. This creates a virtuous circle: speak well, get the right response from others, feel more confident, speak more and express yourself with an even wider range of vocabulary. As children from more privileged backgrounds grow up in a highly communicative environment, so does their confidence in their ability to speak and, critically, their expectation that they will be heard, rooted as it is in countless moments of encouragement and correction. In my own family, for all that we prized verbal pyrotechnics, we just didn’t have this kind of relationship with language, or with each other. There was warmth, but it didn’t – it couldn’t – express itself in that way: there were simply too many of us, and too much to do. There was compassion and friendship and solidarity, but there was also shouting, competition for the scant resources of adult attention, and being left to our own devices. Where some of my friends and colleagues grew up in homes that cultivated children’s books, songs and rhymes, conversations and ideas, and reading aloud, I don’t remember a single occasion of anyone ever reading to us, and we certainly had no books in the house. What books would we have in a house that we were going to leave in a month? And how could anyone read to us when they could barely read themselves?
Reading can easily seem like an indulgence, or a middle-class parenting preoccupation of doubtful relevance to the real world. But it’s not: it’s a vital resource, as I discovered when I began, finally, to read for myself – as opposed to because I had to at school – in my late teens. It’s about the benefits of cultural capital in one sense, of knowing the plot of Macbeth or what ‘Dickensian’ means, but also because books teach you about the world, and how to find yourself in it; about how to resolve problems and overcome obstacles; and that other people feel the same as you do. A lot of the answers to the problems encountered by the socially mobile can be found in books, but to be able to find something you have to know that it’s there (and you have to be able to get the books in the first place, something becoming increasingly difficult as the local library becomes a critically endangered species).
* * *
When it comes to adult life and employment, the entry points for the socially mobile are marked by barriers that have as much to do with language as with qualifications: whether that be university interviews, job interviews, networking opportunities, or the many small tests or challenges that emerge from a collective cultural mindset that relies on articulacy as a measure of intelligence and value. Almost all workplaces favour the articulate: whether you’re an artist, a social activist, a solicitor or a senior brand manager, self-employed, working for a large institution like the BBC or civil service, a large corporate company or a small private one, you’ll find yourself at some point attending meetings where you have to command the attention of a number of people simultaneously, pitching to clients or potential employers, establishing good relationships with senior figures in your industry and, of course, networking. Notoriously hard to master, professional networking is often presented as about confidence and extroversion, but it’s also about language: it’s the art of selling yourself to people who you’ve just met, quickly, and with the right balance of inside knowledge, cunning and charm. It is fundamentally about speaking the language of the person you are talking to: often, because that’s the way our society is, that person will be middle class. And this is where we get to a crucial point: people from working-class backgrounds or the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder are by no means less fluent or articulate than those at the top. The musical genres of rap and grime, for example, which emerged from working-class black neighbourhoods in America and London, are almost entirely based on command of language and hyper-articulacy. But not all ways of speaking are created equal in British society, and as a result, young people from deprived backgrounds are subject to linguistic double jeopardy: first, when they’re developing their language skills, and then again when they try to improve their circumstances through education or entering elite careers.
In his play Pygmalion, later filmed as My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’ It remains true that, in modern Britain, accents remain ‘the last form of acceptable prejudice’.14 We’ve come some way since the days of national broadcasters speaking in a barely intelligible and strangled version of received pronunciation (and you can listen to archival material from BBC Radio or Pathé News to hear how far), but we’re still a long way off real ‘accent diversity’.15 This is reflected in the regular surveys that attempt to rank people’s accents. Often presenting themselves as a bit of fun – people from Devon are trustworthy,16 Glaswegian accents are sexy17 – in practice they reflect knee-jerk prejudices that, as one researcher put it, ‘trigger social categorisation in quick, automatic and sometimes unconscious ways’.18 It goes without saying that prejudice against accents says more about existing class prejudices than it does about individual Brummies, or Scousers or Glaswegians. It’s no coincidence that received pronunciation – the generic ‘posh’ accent found across southern England and on the BBC, and which dominates elite professions, despite being spoken by only 3 per cent of the population – is perceived as ‘powerful’ and ‘trustworthy’.19 But for people whose accents aren’t generally ‘acceptable’, these associations can have profoundly negative consequences. Birmingham accents, for instance, which regularly come bottom of the list, are perceived as ‘less attractive’ and ‘less intelligent’,20 or, as Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips, puts it ‘as a tool to have a go at you … They’ll say you sound thick and you’re common and you don’t speak properly.’21
Neither are these matters of personal taste: they leak into our professional lives as well. A recent study found that ‘28 per cent of British employees thought they had been discriminated against because of their accent’ – and they were right: a staggering 80 per cent of employers admitted accent discrimination.22 In 2019, trainee teachers reported being told to soften their accents around the children they taught – even when they came from the same area.23 Likewise, in a trend that repositions Pygmalion as social commentary, elocution (branded as ‘accent softening’) classes are on the rise, something that even a voice coach who taught those classes described as ‘a Band-Aid on a class system that isn’t working’.24
Such is the association between class divisions and accents in Britain that it is impossible to comment on the subject without taking a position of some sort. The way you speak is one of the most intensely personal things about you: it reflects the unique combination of circumstances that shaped you, and is a profound point of connection with the place and people you grew up around. It’s unsurprising, then, that people often feel that the pressure to change their accent – whether direct or indirect – is an attempt to erase their identity. Even small changes can feel like a loss of self: as the author Kit de Waal put it, ‘Your Brummie accent might have the corners shaved off in certain company. Are you still working class? Or have you hopped over the tracks?’25 Others might take a different tack. I notice my young cousins – devoted speakers of Multicultural London English – pursuing careers that require science and maths qualifications, and barely considering the kind of professions where they’d be judged on whether their voices sound acceptably ‘client facing’.
I understand all this, and yet, as a first-generation immigrant who learned English as a third language, part of my response to the way the British agonise over their accents is best described as puzzlement. But I have to admit that, even if I view it with the perspective of an outsider, I’m also a participant. I work in a profession that can only be described as being at the heart of the establishment, and where you rarely hear an accent that would be categorised as anything other than pure RP. I have never had voice coaching, training or elocution lessons, but my own accent has undoubtedly changed, and continues to change depending on where I am and who I am speaking to. I still live in the same neighbourhoods I grew up in, but my voice is one that wouldn’t be out of place broadcasting on BBC Radio 4; it’s the voice that a mentor described as sounding like ‘someone who had been to Eton’; it’s the voice that a colleague in chambers once remarked as being ‘from the Home Counties’; and it does not give away the fact that English is not my first language. To me, though, it doesn’t reflect compromises made and identity distorted: it’s hard to imagine how my ‘original’ accent could be some profound expression of my inner self, given that it was formed by the quirk of fate that landed us in Wembley and not, say, Minnesota or Malmö. Instead, it shows the changes my life has undergone. With each stage, another chapter was written. I started to move in new kinds of circles, join new communities, and the world which was slowly becoming mine changed me.
All this is a part of the man I am, and none of my modes of speaking is – at least from my perspective – better than the other. I don’t think that ‘speaking well’ automatically equates to speaking with an RP accent, or that the kind of slang you might hear at an Oxford College or on the streets of Chelsea is necessarily better or more expressive than the slang that my cousins and their friends use in North West London. But the rule that I have applied elsewhere plays a role here too; I have to deal with the world as it is, rather than as it should be. As a result, I am an accent pragmatist: if the world changed tomorrow and everyone on the BBC and the high court bench was speaking with a Brummie accent – I’d learn. I am constantly travelling the country, meeting all sorts of people from different types of socioeconomic backgrounds, different expectations and prejudices; in village halls, courtrooms, dingy meeting rooms and formal dinners. I have to work out the best way to win over a potential witness, to present a client’s case, to inspire confidence in people and show them what I am capable of, to explain to them, through words and actions, that I am the right man for the job, to prove why I was hired in the first place. To win. Using language and my voice effectively helps me do that, and the same applies to anyone reading this book who wants to begin their own social mobility story. Consider what will help you most, reflect on what you see in your future, identify where your personal red lines are – and ignore the rest.
* * *
The way we perceive certain accents is partly down to the kind of direct prejudice that Britain is seeped in. But it is compounded by the fact that we are naturally drawn to people who we perceive to be like us, something that is known as homophily or affinity bias. This process begins very early: babies have a preference for people who speak the language they heard most of while they were in utero, and by the time they are a few months old, they show a strong bias in favour of both native language and accent.26 Scientists call this a ‘social preference’, and it continues into later life: when we want to describe having something in common with someone or being in agreement, we often reach for a linguistic metaphor like ‘speaking the same language’ or ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’. Most people are familiar with the experience of slightly changing their accent or the way they speak just in order to get on better with someone. When the Ghanaian-British professor of philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah found himself adjusting his accent in an American direction when telling New York taxi drivers where he wanted to go, he saw it as a natural instinct to make himself easier to understand to people who were often, like him, immigrants in America.27 But, of course, it doesn’t stop there. In interviews and at work, it’s well recognised that gatekeepers who guard the social mobility checkpoints prefer candidates who seem like them, even if they don’t consciously realise it: a high value is placed on someone who already speaks and expresses themselves like a lawyer, or a doctor or a teacher, or, in other words, who sounds like the interviewer. Now, you may not think that this affects you. You may think you’re the most open-minded individual when it comes to judging others, that you base everything on objective observations about character and qualifications. If so, then you’re not only sadly mistaken, you’re part of the problem, especially if you’re in a powerful position in, say, recruitment. Even though I’m more alert to the pitfalls than most, I often find myself drawn to people during interviews at my chambers who seem, quite apart from their qualifications, ‘like one of us’. I have found that I preferred people who I could imagine in a meeting with my colleagues, people I instinctively felt were saying the right things, who could be confident performers before a court or in front of clients. Thinking someone is like you, often means choosing someone who just sounds like you.
This combination – of direct prejudice and unconscious bias – confronts the socially mobile person with a choice: learn to speak the language of the world you want to join or speak the way you’ve always spoken and take the consequences. Of course, language skills are still important – an articulate, communicative, expressive candidate should still make an impression. But when you’re up against the perception that you need to ‘fit in’ and ‘speak the same language’ the answer lies (for some people) in code-switching. This is something all of us do fairly naturally, and it is fundamental to my own life. Essentially, if you view different areas of life as having their own distinct linguistic registers – a more formal, slang-free register for professional meetings, a boisterous, sweary register for a football match – then code-switching is the term for the change between them. A shared ‘language’ eases communication within a group, whether in the formal environment of a courtroom or the villa in Love Island. That might seem simplistic – surely no one needs to be told this? – but again, it’s not obvious to everyone, and even if it is, working out the code of a group that you’ve previously had no contact with can be very difficult, as can working out what is and isn’t ‘allowed’. When I think about code-switching I think about how, during my childhood, my mother, my aunt and the other older relatives would struggle to get the simplest thing done for them at the housing office. The disdain they would be treated with as a result is etched into my memory. Even now, I’ll take the phone from my mother, struggling to have a charge removed from her phone bill, and hear the problem melt away in front of my voice – the voice, tone and vocabulary of someone who ‘sounds like they grew up in the Home Counties’. Is it fair? No. But it is effective.
In fact, the sheer effectiveness of code-switching can create complicated feelings in the socially mobile: as you change your choice of words, dialect, and tone, it also changes you. As the writer Lynsey Hanley put it in her book Respectable: ‘Putting on a posh voice when you think it would be useful doesn’t change you at your core, whereas learning the formal code of middle-class speech brings about permanent change, [partly] because it works – it gets things done, it makes people regard you differently no matter how you regard yourself.’28 I have constant battles with my young cousins, who are confirmed speakers of Multicultural London English, about the importance of code-switching. To them, there’s nothing wrong with the way they speak – it’s a form of language that has evolved around them, and feels natural. And, of course, they are right, and I understand the reluctance to adopt a way of speaking that feels foreign and perhaps uncomfortable, even just in the workplace. Code-switching is difficult, tiring and involves tolerating a fair amount of cognitive dissonance – it’s not an easy route to take. It is, of course, not fair that our society requires it of people who simply want to improve their circumstances. But neither is it fair to pretend to young people that they don’t need to do it to get ahead. It was code-switching to which David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, referred, when he told a group of sixth-formers in London uncompromisingly: ‘Innit or “izzit” is not going to get you a job. Don’t let any idiot tell you you’ll get a job by saying “innit” and “izzit” because you won’t. [Don’t listen to] damn foolish liberals saying it’s fine.’29
In The Class Ceiling, the research carried out by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison suggested that this is good advice: as one senior partner at a tax firm they talked to put it:
Language and articulation is a huge differentiator and it’s probably one of the few things that makes me go … When I hear people using inaccurate grammar or things like that, it’s a very obvious identifier of something, a regional dialect that hasn’t been tempered30
I’ve quoted this in full because there’s something interesting about it. For someone who clearly finds articulacy very important, the speaker is struggling to explain exactly what he’s talking about. ‘A very obvious identifier of something’ – of what? I would suggest that, although he feels uncomfortable acknowledging it publicly, it’s to do with employability, ‘fit’, ‘polish’ or something similar. This is the consequence of not changing your accent or your code, of forgoing the opportunity to use the tools of the world you find yourself in so that you might better help your own progress. My young cousins do not set off every morning into a neutral world in which people are only interested in what they have to say rather than the way they are saying it, no matter how awkward we might find it to admit. And, given that being a young black man with a Muslim name in Britain is far from a neutral existence, why should those young men compound the issue by sticking rigidly to just one linguistic register? The answer lies, it seems to me, in encouraging range and flexibility in a way that reflects both our current landscape, with its shibboleths and prejudices, and the more open and tolerant place it could become. Young people should be given the opportunity to ‘speak the language’ of elite institutions, which they may never have encountered, but we should also jettison the damaging idea that there is one, single, ‘right’ form of the language. Exposing young people, as early as possible, to unfamiliar contexts, voices and accents, to people and environments who are very different to those of their upbringing, gives them the opportunity and the tools to decide for themselves. And, of course, if you have never been exposed to a particular setting, such as the Bar, you need to adapt perhaps more consciously to that new situation than others do. What is wrong with that?
As we saw in the previous chapter, young people who are attempting to change their circumstances are often exposed to the idea that they need to remain ‘true to themselves’ and that any change is ‘selling out’ or somehow inauthentic. My objection is twofold. Firstly, young black boys, for example, face enough discrimination without deliberately giving up one of the few things that is within their control: the opportunity to use language to shape their own narrative. Evolve or die; if nothing else my family’s journey has been a reminder of this. The best teachers, social workers, the most supportive parents and mentors (of whom there are many) understand that it’s not about who you are now – it’s about who you could be. But the idea that the ‘true self’ of a young person from a disadvantaged background is fixed is also profoundly patronising – and not all that different from the kind of prejudice that leads my colleague to suggest that I couldn’t sound the way I do and come from anywhere but the Home Counties. At heart, it’s the assumption that people who come from a certain kind of background must never change or develop: that our expectations for how they act or speak must never be challenged. If you’re French or Irish and settle in Britain, over time your accent might soften or you might consciously change it in order to be better understood – and no one will come and take away your passport. But if your journey is across class boundaries, and you change the way you talk, to a lot of people that means you’re waving goodbye to really belonging anywhere. That new accent isn’t really yours, because we know you didn’t always speak that way – and you’re not a real working-class person either, because what working-class person speaks like you? You’re a fake, you’ve been trained, you’re not authentic. In other words, you’re trapped in one place, forever the person you were at what might have been the worst point in your life. These are the walls that, as Appiah puts it ‘hedge us in; walls we played no part in designing, walls without doors and windows, walls that block our vision and obstruct our way, walls that will not let in fresh and enlivening air.’31 This is using language against people who wish to better their lives, to seek more opportunities for themselves, who are shamed into a corner, forced into a box that’s marked ‘this is you, do not attempt to escape’. It’s yet another example of the failure of imagination that at every single level holds back the socially mobile.
* * *
Despite the fact that language is demonstrably a fluid and ever-changing thing, pearl-clutching among the self-appointed guardians of ‘proper English’ about the way young people speak is nothing new. The tight connections between language, accent and identity are vigorously policed at all levels of society, and often reveal prejudices that are as much to do with race as class. In recent decades, this anxiety has attached itself to Multicultural London/Urban English (MLE), or ‘Jafaican’32 (spoken where I grew up, as mentioned earlier), and this has lead to criticism of young people of all ethnicities for, essentially, ‘sounding black’. This is what the historian David Starkey meant when he made his infamous comments after the London riots, that ‘the whites have become black’, and were speaking like it, using ‘this language which is wholly false … this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country’.33 For Starkey, there were clearly two kinds of speech, one acceptable and one not, and they mapped easily on to racial categories. ‘Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If … you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.’34 This, presumably, was meant to be a compliment.
Starkey’s statements provoked more than 700 complaints to the BBC and condemnation from both sides of the political spectrum.35 But similar ideas – that ways of speaking belong to particular ethnicities, that ‘sounding black’ is not the same as sounding ‘successful’ – continue to bubble up throughout the debate. There certainly is a sense in which a middle-class person who adopts the accent of a lower socio-economic group will be perceived as inauthentic: witness the mockery of politicians such as Tony Blair and George Osborne for speaking in ‘mockney’. The middle-class journalists and parents who write semi-humorous articles in tabloids despairing of their ‘nicely bought up’ children speaking ‘patois’, similarly often adopt a teasing tone in order to disguise, as a defence of ‘proper English’, their anxieties about their offspring’s potential downward mobility. But if the worst thing that can happen to you is being teased, you’re already on the right side of the equation: being laughed at for faking an accent to sound cool is not the same as the unconscious bias and suspicion that lies beneath statements like ‘but you sound white!’ or ‘you can’t be from Newcastle!’. The policing of these categories – and the tacit understanding that some ways of speaking can be authentically spoken only by particular groups – comes from all sides: internally from the cultures themselves, from self-appointed protectors of white culture such as Starkey, and from well-meaning liberals who assume that ‘be true to yourself!’ is advice that works for everyone. Some have suggested that counselling young people from ethnic minorities to change the way they speak or present themselves means advising them to conform to a form of ‘whiteness’ – whatever that means. But RP doesn’t belong to white people, and neither does being articulate and effective in your deployment of language. Young people have the right to speak however they wish, without boundaries or being told they must represent and ‘stay true to’ the culture they happen to be born into.
* * *
Language and forms of expression are at the heart of the social mobility story in Britain. But the person speaking is only half the equation: the other half is the person listening. For a socially mobile person, that means knowing your interlocutor, finding the right words and the right way to express a thought or idea, about being aware of nuances in terms of what the other person brings to the table. What prejudices do they carry when they hear you speak, and how best do you neutralise those prejudices and still get your point across, ensuring that you’re communicating effectively? It’s a careful balancing act requiring tact, empathy and the ability to hold many different versions of the same reality in play simultaneously. But crack it, and you’ve unlocked the key to success, to informing, influencing, inspiring and motivating others on your behalf. And it can make the difference between getting your foot in the door and having it shut in your face.
If you’re the listener, your task is different – and not necessarily easier. The socially mobile person has, of necessity, to focus on the world as it is: working out the rules and how they can be bent or adapted to provide new opportunities. But yours is the task of changing that world; of freeing yourself from your preconceptions, your baked-in ideas about what constitutes intelligence or professionalism. We must challenge not only ourselves, but one another, to be guided not by prejudice, but to judge people on what they’re saying and not on how they are saying it. New studies suggest that as we mix more as a society, both through social media and because we are an increasingly well-educated population, ‘the old ties between accent and social class are fast coming loose’. As a result, what to do about language is becoming ‘a matter of conscious choice’.36 We need to be more imaginative, more acutely self-aware when we are making those instantaneous judgements about others, and look beyond the voice to what the person in front of you at interview – or the colleague you work alongside, or the person pitching an idea – is actually saying.
But in order to get to this point, we have to start early. Oracy is a life skill that can make a massive difference to someone’s social mobility prospects. It can help young disaffected boys to find the right words to express what they’re feeling. It can give children the confidence to believe that what they have to say is worth listening to, that their words, their ideas, their thinking matters. In March 2018 I spoke to a gathering of 750 teachers at the inaugural Great Oracy Exhibition, recounting the story of my origins, and the evolution of my own oracy and accent. The exhibition – the first of its kind nationally, if not internationally – was the brainchild of Voice 21, an oracy programme and charity set up at School 21 in Stratford, East London, which was founded by Peter Hyman, the former chief speech-writer and strategist to Tony Blair. School 21 has always championed the importance of spoken language, and Peter and a large cohort of dedicated and driven individuals have, ever since, been pioneering a simple idea: to make oracy one of the main areas of focus for schools and teachers, right up there with writing, reading and numeracy. The exhibition was an inspiring sight. Sixth-formers held panel discussions with a Channel 4 reporter; Year 5 students travelled from Manchester to share their performance poetry depicting the strength of their community in the aftermath of the Manchester bombings; and Year 6s fervently challenged society’s apathy towards single-use plastics. Teachers, too, were immersed in participatory assemblies, vocal warm-ups, debates and discussions. Everywhere I looked, each voice was valued and every idea heard.
There is a real movement afoot, led by teachers who want to prioritise the art and science of speaking as the driving force behind a new type of education; through engaged learning, debate rhetoric and collaboration.37 The aim of this pursuit of a more fully rounded education is to induct these youngsters into important academic disciplines while at the same time giving them a voice and a purpose; the ability to take on the world. There is some way to go: a report commissioned by Voice 21, The State of Speaking in our Schools, polled over 900 teachers and found that while the majority think oracy is as important, if not more so, than traditional areas such as literacy and numeracy, only a minority of schools are consistently providing meaningful opportunities for students to develop these skills. Moreover, teachers feel ill-equipped to effectively teach their students oracy, concerned by time pressures, competing priorities and a lack of support from senior leadership. The kind of environments we need to nurture would set high expectations for students as orators, and would expose them to a wide variety of contexts for discussion across a range of subjects. And it can happen: I have seen students as young as eight being supported to deliver compelling speeches on racism, political activism, the refugee crisis and animal rights. In some European countries, such as France, it is compulsory for students to regularly present to whole classrooms, in order to build confidence in explaining ideas. We need to make more time for this in our curriculum. This is the only way we are going to close Britain’s language gap, which, as we know, can be so determinative of someone’s life chances.
Teaching and learning in this model are a dialogic process, where ideas and opinions are crafted verbally, with structures and feedback to enable both students and teacher to reflect on the quality of talk in the classroom. Again, I’m aware that the space and time to create these opportunities requires ample resources, leadership and consistency over a significant period of time. But recognising the remarkable impact that oracy can have, in unlocking student potential and transforming teaching more broadly, may yet encourage leaders in education to push this idea through. Increasingly, these voices are being heard, not least in Parliament, where in May 2018 an all-party parliamentary group on oracy was launched by Emma Hardy MP, setting the foundations for a wider enquiry into the state of oracy education in schools nationally.38
I believe that, once we get to a place where young people are trained, prepped, pushed and encouraged to be articulate, where they can deploy a wide vocabulary with a clarity of thought, and are armed with new and exciting ideas, then we might be in a position to reshape the current linguistic landscape in favour of social, cultural and ethnic diversity. Perhaps then we will have found a way of neutralising prejudices instead of playing right into them. Perhaps we will have conquered another corner of the social mobility story and moved one step closer to a more equal society.