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Why it’s better to keep schtum if you’re a Brum
By FIONA MacRAE and JENNY HOPE – More by this author »

Last updated at 00:01am on 4th April 2008

There’s only one thing worse than an attractive person giving you the silent treatment.
And that’s when they open their mouth and out comes a Birmingham accent – or so researchers claim.
According to them, Brummie talk is less appealing than saying nothing at all.
They say it characterises the speaker as less intelligent and less attractive than others.

Researcher Lance Workman, a softly-spoken Welshman, presented the study at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference in Dublin.

He said: “Part of the stereotype about Birmingham is that there is a lot of criminal activity and a number of studies have shown that people associate criminal activity with low intelligence.”

Working with Birmingham-born colleague Hayley-Jane Smith, Dr Workman asked a group of adults to rate pictures of four young women for attractiveness and intelligence.

They were either shown the pictures in silence or while listening to a short passage being read out in one of three accents – Birmingham, Yorkshire or Received Pronunciation.

Despite the young women all looking very similar and the same information being read out each time, some were instantly judged as being more clever than others.

Top came the Yorkshire accent, with an intelligence score of 6.71 out of 10.

Next was RP, at 6.67, followed by silence with 5.99.

Last was the Birmingham accent, with a score of 5.6. A similar association between accent and attractiveness was found.

Dr Workman, of Bath Spa University, said the triumph of the Yorkshire accent showed that the clipped upper-class tones of RP are no longer a byword for intelligence.

“There is a general shift away from RP as the most intelligent-voice. It is a sort of cultural evolution and regional dialects are now seen more positively – but some more than others.”

Dr Workman, added: “Places like Birmingham might eventually catch up. It could be in ten years that the Birmingham one is the one everyone want to do.”

However Adrian Chiles, host of BBC1’s The One Show, has credited his accent with helping his career rather than hindering it. “If you speak with a Birmingham accent, people assume you’re thick,” he said recently.

“It means you only have to string two sentences together and ask one decent question and they look at you like you’re a genius.”

sorry…..updated now :wink: