November 8, 2025 (Updated )
Venture across Britain and you’ll hear a new accent for every mile you go, with some 40 identifiable accents across the nation. Turn on your TV or radio, however, and you’ll be hard-pressed to hear a prominent regional accent.
Anna*, a broadcast journalist from Newcastle, knew from the start of her career that her Geordie accent could take her down one of two paths. “I definitely was aware that there weren’t many people with my accent on the TV,” she says. “Either there could be this gap in the market that maybe I could break through, or equally, there could be a lot of challenges.”
At university, she faced never-ending stereotypes, particularly because her peers’ only perceptions of Geordie women came from the debauched MTV reality series Geordie Shore. Anna has no idea how this would translate into the working world: “In social settings, people have preconceived ideas about what I’m like as a person, which leads to me not being treated in a nice way, in many cases.”
When it comes to having a regional accent in Britain, stereotyping and a lack of opportunity aren’t just confined to social interactions. Issues of accent and class bias are still all too common in the workplace — even more so in an industry which often relies on people telling the news with their voices.
Megan Ioannides, writer of this piece, talks about her motivation for writing it.
Accents are intrinsically linked to geography and where we’re from, but according to a 2022 Sutton Trust report, they’re also a primary indicator of socio-economic status. More prominent regional accents like those of West Yorkshire, Newcastle, and Liverpool in the North of England, as well as Brummie, Glaswegian, or South Wales elsewhere, derive from the working-class nature of these cities in British history.
On the other hand, Received Pronunciation (RP), often referred to as ‘Queen’s English’ or ‘Oxford English’, is traditionally noted as the UK’s most prestigious accent and is associated with the upper and middle classes, rather than a fixed geographical location. This ingrained correlation between accents and class can lead to negative stereotypes about a person’s character — recent research found people perceived those with a Scouse accent as the most likely to commit a crime.
Dr Christian Ilbury, a linguistics professor at the University of Edinburgh, explains this as the premise of linguistic discrimination. “Accent doesn’t have any connection to competence; you can be competent and speak a regional variety. But we have this weird association in society at large where we hear someone speak and we start making interpretations about their competence, about their intelligence; things that have nothing to do with accent. When people use judgments about language to make non- or unrelated judgments about character or contents, that is problematic.”
Whether the stereotypes associated with regional speakers are subconscious or actively drawn upon to discriminate, the result is the same – working-class people are wrongly judged, excluded from opportunities, or forced to ‘prove’ themselves in their professional lives, simply because of how they speak.
In 2006, a study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that 76 per cent of employers admitted to discriminating against candidates during the hiring process because of their accents. Later research by Accent Bias Britain in 2019 found that “despite some change, a clear hierarchy of accents has remained consistent for the last 50 years”. Yet accents aren’t a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, meaning the practice isn’t illegal.
It’s a problem that’s been long-rooted in journalism; Lord Reith, the first director general of the BBC, decreed that RP was the accent that most people would understand. It would take until 1941 for the first Northern accent to hit the airwaves. Forty years later, announcer Susan Rae found herself receiving hate mail for her Dundonian accent.
Things have undoubtedly improved since — but there’s still a long way to go. Just three per cent of the population speak RP, yet a 2017 study of BBC radio stations found that RP features were still popular in news reading and it was a preferred accent for national stations. The latest data from the National Council for the Training of Journalists also shows that 65 per cent of journalists come from middle- or upper-class backgrounds, compared to 45 per cent of all UK workers.
Delve deeper and you’ll also find there’s a divide in which accents are featured in which segments. Think about the TV or radio presenters with regional accents that do exist and you’ll find they’re often grouped into entertainment or light-hearted programming. “There is still a considerable difference in the accents […] with entertainment programmes having much more instances of non-standard phonetic features than the news and sports news,” concludes the 2017 research.
Jasmine talks about class bias in UK newsrooms.
“I think anything that’s deemed more highbrow or authoritative, it’s a bit harder to find regional accents,” Anna agrees. Samuel* a freelance broadcast journalist from Hull, adds: “I haven’t heard my accent in a position of authority because there’s still exceptional classism in the newsroom.”
Many of the journalists we spoke to also said they’d received feedback on their accents. One recent journalism graduate told us: “I did work experience for a local mainstream radio station and I got to record a demo and get feedback on it. I got an email picking up on my accent and how I pronounce certain words for feedback.”
Similarly, Samuel says they were told at university to “reduce the obviousness of my accent in order to speak more clearly”. He adds: “After the feedback, I worked hard to remove traces of my accent.”
Sometimes, though, the discrimination can be more subtle. Anna recalls: “When I worked in a newsroom outside of the North East, I’d be trying to have a conversation about work and my colleague would interrupt and say: ‘That sounds so funny in your accent’. You can’t really get on with your job, almost. Little things will be pointed out.” For many, these feelings of exclusion, discrimination, or even internalised bias can prompt those who want to ‘make it’ to dilute or erase their natural accents.
“I always felt that unless I wanted to do local journalism in Wales, I would have to fit in in London,” says Katherine*, a freelance journalist. “I don’t know where I got it from, but I feared from a very young age that my regional accent would be associated with lower intelligence and class. So I made an effort to lose it, even while I was still at school in Wales.” It’s also something freelance journalist Rhys Thomas wrote about in the i Paper, calling his decision to edit out his accent “the biggest regret of my life”.
Not only is it extremely difficult to alter your natural speech, but as Dr Christian emphasises, “the onus should never be on the individual”. For those struggling, he advises: “You speak this way because that’s your identity and if someone has an issue with the way you speak, then they have an issue with your identity.”
But change could be on the horizon. While traditional media structures seem only to have preserved accent inequality, social media is helping those with regional accents get their foot in the door. Dr Christian explains: “We call social media ‘participatory culture’, which means that there’s a low barrier to participation, meaning anyone can upload something.”
“That has led to types of citizen journalism; you have everyday people (who maybe would have been prevented by an institutional media agency) accessing and interviewing people. Traditional journalism has changed substantially in relation to these kinds of developments. I think for social mobility, social media does something really cool in terms of levelling opportunities.”
Charley Marlowe, who describes herself as Scouse, has gone on to secure interviewer roles at major film premieres and the BBC, while GK Barry now hosts their own podcast Saving Grace, and Max Belegde co-hosts The Useless Hotline.
Mancunian journalist Liv Marks-Howarth, who interviews celebrities for short-form videos, says: “I was always told growing up that my accent would put me at a disadvantage if I wanted to get into journalism. Luckily, I haven’t experienced any discrimination surrounding my accent. If anything, I think regional or Northern accents are now a real benefit and set you apart from others.”
And, perhaps what Liz says is true, with change slowly seeping into the mainstream. Channel 4 lunchtime show Steph’s Packed Lunch, hosted by Geordie presenter Steph McGovern, ran for three years until December 2023. It’s a great example of regional accents being given authority to take on weightier topics — and an important bit of Geordie representation to Anna: “That’s the thing that’s really nice, that Steph can interview a politician and hold them to account, and do that in an accent.”
The change is happening — but there’s still a long way to go. The key, says Dr Christian, is representation. “Greater representation leads to a dismantling of a system that really doesn’t need to exist […] Simply talking about this and raising awareness of it is the most effective intervention.”
The more we address accent biases and the underlying classism that comes with them, the closer we get to eradicating them — and providing a prominent home to all 40 of the UK’s accents and dialects.
*Some names have been changed or shortened to allow interviewees to freely speak about their employers.
