Birmingham: It’s Not Shit

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Last years inaugural Talk Like a Brummie Day was loads of fun, thousands of people (on top of the million or so that already do) spent one day practising their best Brummie accents and I spent the day rushing between TV and radio interviews. It did seem to raise conciousness of the plight of the Brummie, and there’s a sense (with no corroborating figures) that our accent might be less abused in the media.

That said there’s more to do, take adverts; for every cute Brummie Feta cheese that says “what have I towld yew about playin with yer food?” there’s a guy that knows too much about ballet while at a pub quiz machine and gets sucked up a tube.

But how good does “plié” sound in a Brummie accent? No wonder the Royal Ballet moved here.

A few people have been asking when this year’s TLAB Day was, so I thought I’d mention that Talk Like a Brummie Day is like Comic Relief. Not “associated with Lenny Henry and not funny”, but “every two years”.

So join us for all your Talking Like a Brummie requirements on Friday 17 July 2009.

The Brummie Dictionary project is still going on the TLAB site, add your words or phrases.

If I was the sort to decide on New Year’s resolutions, then one would have been making a concious effort not to get upset about this sort of thing:

Why it may be better not to speak up if you’re a Brummie - BBC NEWS

“The study, which matched accents with perceived intelligence, found speaking in a Birmingham accent gives a worse impression than saying nothing at all.”

Lazy headlines, lazy articles, easy shots - at least for once it doesn’t seem that it’s just a press release form an insurance company (or similar) - Let’s look at the evidence, or lack thereof:

• 48 people were involved in the study, do you think 48 is a particularly large number, the sort that might extrapolate well to making generalisations on the population of Britain (60M?) as a whole?
• No-where that I can find are the methods or the details of the study available - I’ve emailed Dr Lance Workman so I’ll see what happens.

I don’t think I’m alone in just being fed up to the back teeth of this coming up every six months or so, in different forms. People do it because the media fall for it every time, each local area can have its own story, they’ve got their contributors lined up, they can pop out and do a few voxes without travelling far from their newsrooms.

It’s the casual prejudice - that is furthered by the light hearted reporting - that gets me, would a similar survey based on race, gender, religion or sexuality be treated as a laugh?

Looks like we may need TLABD08 then.

Paul Groves isn’t too hot on the thing either

Looks like we might need a Talk Like A Brummie Day next year, the Press Association are still lazily reporting surveys for completely unrelated companies, from tiny samples, that do nothing but ridicule people for where they come from:

the Birmingham accent was the one parents would least like their child to use.

Have you heard of Talk Like A Pirate Day? We have an idea… how about Talk Like A Brummie Day? Well, if this comes off, this July people around the city and the rest of the country with be asked to spend one day talking like a Brummie, in the hope that it will break down some of the prejudice and stereotyping that surrounds Birmingham’s accent. We’re trying to get Londoners, Scots, Mancs and even Brummies who usually hide their accent to call each other “bab” and hope that it doesn’t get too “dark over Bill’s mother’s”.

The Talk Like A Brummie Day website at www.talklikeabrummieday.co.uk includes links to existing dictionaries and collections of Brummie - please add any you know of. There are posters, screensavers and other bits to download.

You can also leave your own favourite Brummie phrases or words, building up a dictionary and helping to promote the region’s particular take on the English Language. When TLABD (as we’re already calling it) is over we’ll try to squidge it into a proper downloadable book or something.

Special events would be great and we’ve got one or two irons in the fire to be announced near the time, hopefully, although anyone wanting to organise their own event - readings of Brummie poetry, bands or singers that use sing like Brummies - can do and we’ll add them to the site, particularly Brummie expats in other towns or cities around the UK. As we know, Shakespeare’s sonnets work especially well in a Brummie accent.

How often do we hear or read that ‘the Brummie accent has been named the least intelligent’, or ‘boring’, in unscientific polls? The council have done a fine job changing the image of the city, but Brummies need to celebrate our accent and dialect and encourage everyone to ‘Talk Like a Brummie’ for one day. Come on everyone, join in, don’t gerra cobb on!

As B:iNS loyalists, if any of you want to help - we’ll need it probably, drop us an email.

Birmingham Voices Against Poverty is a blog and a series of podcasts of one hundred brummies who want their voices against poverty heard - run by the Birmingham branch of Oxfam. It’s nice to hear such a variety of accents…

cheers Podnosh