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About UK, I wasn’t aware of a snobbery issue around accents until I’ve lived in Scotland for some months when I was 25: there, I’ve realized not only that Scottish accent is actually quite different from “Oxford” English, the “cut-glass” accent (but I’ve soon got attached to it!), but also that people from other parts of UK were mocking Scottish people and in meantime Scottish people were used to make fun of Asian people living there…
In my country, Italy, I think it is no so different: snobbery around accents exist among different parts of the country, among different Regions (20) and even among different areas of the same Region (eg Bergamo vs Varese, Firenze vs Pisa, Palermo vs Messina and so on).
And what I believe is that dwelling on accents is always a way to spot cultural differences: for example people with accent of Rome are associated with laziness, those with accent of Naples with cunning; and the other way around, people from Genova are stingy, the Piemonteses “falsi e cortesi” (that means incinsere and kind) and so on…
Me too, I have experienced some kind of discrimination because of my strange accent: I have grown up in a village near Milan but with parents from the South (mam from Sicily and dad from Campania) and so my accent wasn’t so aligned with that one of the children born there from native parents… Once, I opened my school diary and I found the word “terrona” written in big and red letters, I was completely shocked!
And the funny thing was that when I was in the South to visit my relatives, they called me “polentona” for joke! It was like not to have an identity, just because I had not a precise accent… what a silly thing!
Now, my accent doesn’t bother me at all… Another little personal story: while I was studying theatre, I’ve followed elocution lessons and so I’ve made my accent situation even more confused. I started answering the common question “How are you” with “bène” in place of “béne” as people in Milan wrongly pronounce this term, or saying “bigliétto del trèno” in place of “bigliètto del tréno” (train ticket)… “Parla come mangi!” (that means “Speak like you eat!”) was the reaction of people talking with me… What a laugh!
In English too, my worry is not about accent, that obviously everyone recognizes as Italian, but I would certainly like to improve the pronunciation of some words or expressions just with the purpose to be well understood and communicate better and better!
