Northern Brits and Irish Can Spot Your Fake Signs Quickly

You’d better ditch that poor attempt at a Scottish brogue, mate: A research team has found that people in the north of the United Kingdom and Ireland are particularly good at telling when you’re lying.

The study surveyed nearly 1,000 participants from across the UK and Ireland and found that people from Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the northeast of England were better at identifying simulated native words than participants from further south. The team’s research was published today on Evolutionary Science. The new paper focuses mainly on people from the UK and Ireland, but it’s a fair warning to those of us in North America about trying those bad words.

“We found for the first time that people in all groups are better than average at detecting when someone is naming any accent (across all seven UK and Irish accents we tested),” said Jonathan Goodman, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and co-author. paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “Secondly, we found that some groups of native speakers are better than others at recognizing when someone is making their own words.”

The team recorded speakers using accents from the northeast of England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex, and standard British English. Participants were asked to record themselves saying a number of test sentences, including “He kicked the goose hard with his foot,” “Jenny told him to face his weight,” “Kit walked around the room,” “Hold up the two cooked tea bags,” and “He thought a bath would make him happy.” Sentences include words that ‘tell’ whether the speaker’s pronunciation was correct or incorrect.

“We worked with the phonetics lab here at Cambridge to develop sentences that mock the exact phonetic differences in pronunciation of certain words,” Goodman said. “For example, for some people the word ‘wash’ rhymes with ‘route’; to others, ‘with a moth.’ These differences create what we would call direct signals that link regions across the UK and Ireland. “

Participants’ recordings were played in 2- to 3-second clips to other participants. The team found that participants from Belfast were the best at identifying fake names, with locals in the north-east of England and Dublin in second and third place. Audiences in Essex, Bristol, and London were less accurate.

“This account both predicts better imitation acquisition among speakers from areas with high intergroup tension, such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin, and explains why an area like Essex may have poor imitation acquisition,” the team wrote in the paper. “Specifically, speakers of the Essex language moved to this area within the last 25 years from London—a stark contrast to speakers living in Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin, whose names evolved through centuries of cultural conflict and violence.”

That is one side of the coin. Another aspect, the team suggested in the paper, is that people in London and Bristol may not be able to pronounce something because they are surrounded by a wide variety of words on a daily basis.

The study is reminiscent of a puzzling medical case described last year, in which a man with metastatic prostate cancer developed “an uncontrollable ‘Irish brogue’ speech despite having no Irish background,” according to a study published in BMJ Case Reports. The team concluded that the man it had a problem with speech, a real thing that made the audience perceive changes in a person’s speech as a form of pronunciation. That work did not show that the Irish brogue was convincing how much.

A recent study surveyed only participants from the UK and Ireland, but Americans—let’s not pretend we’re doing the polite British or Irish way. I think we would all be better off if we didn’t try.