Every sun demands a shadow, and Oxford is not exempt: a darkness lies beneath the University’s glittering magnetism. Engrained classism is found in all corners under the dreaming spires. One manifestation of this is accent prejudice, which awards a Southern drawl the gold medal.
I encountered this bias immediately in my first term. A disclaimer: despite growing up in Birmingham, I do not have a Brummie accent, something I attribute to having a Welsh mother and a Londoner as a dad. Coming to Oxford was the first time this lack of accent, a notable absence of “bab!” in my vernacular, was complimented: Freshers week had been a series of congratulations, “You don’t sound like you are from there, well done!”. I was once accused of lying: “You must be from London, go on, just admit it!”.
However, rather than taking offence, I took solace in these remarks. Riddled with imposter syndrome, it was hard not to smile when asked what part of London or Surrey I was from. They think I am one of them, I would excitedly mutter: I belong. This quiet thrill spoke to my anxiety about fitting in, driven by the idea that the “true” Oxford student fitted a narrow, privileged mould.
To the joy of my insecure self, my accent helped me to blend into the sea of majority Southern students. In 2021-2023, 28.7% of admitted undergraduates were from London, and a further 29.5% came from the South East or South West. This geographical dominance helped me fit in, but my experience was also riddled with classist prejudice. For example, after a string of wrong guesses about my background, someone pleaded, “Oh God forbid, don’t tell me you’re from the North?!”. When someone found out I lived in Birmingham, they half-jokingly offered me a place to stay at their family’s country estate during the holidays – because, apparently, “a girl like you shouldn’t live there.”
What girl had they mistaken me for? All I knew was that my accent had played its part in making me palatable for the most affluent students. Yet sounding the part only works up to a point: accent isn’t enough. When asked, “Where do you summer?”, I was confused, not realising “summer” could be a verb. When asked which school I went to, the expectation was that I would name one of a handful of elite institutions. Accents might change, but backgrounds don’t. A different vowel pronunciation couldn’t suddenly place a silver spoon in my mouth.
Looking back at my insecure fresher self, I feel a sense of shame, even sadness, about how I navigated my first few months in Oxford. Like a magpie attracted to shiny things, I consciously and unconsciously mimicked the accents around me, adopting new pronunciations and vowel sounds. When I returned home, my family would comment that I sounded “posher,”; however, instead of feeling proud, I felt like a traitor, a sell-out. The “compliments” that once reassured me at Oxford now seemed hollow. I realised that I had severed myself from my roots, and destroyed the footsteps which had got me to Oxford in the first place. I hated myself for it.
The self-hatred also came with a fractured sense of identity. My accent shifted between Southern intonations and full Welsh vowels, leaving me unsure which, if any, was my “true” voice. I could not properly recall how I used to speak and when home friends commented on how much my accent had changed, I often wondered how authentically myself I was. I ultimately was left not knowing who my “true” self was. My sense of identity had been utterly distorted.
The pivotal moment of change came when my tutor said he could tell I was part Welsh by the “lyrical” and “musical” way I wrote. With excitement, I immediately spoke of my favourite childhood memories by the Welsh coast and explained that my house had never known silence as classical music had always filled its walls. Through my words and how I wrote, he had seen my story. His observation was neither moralistic nor loaded with an expectation I should change myself to conform. In fact, he didn’t want me to.
I had felt such relief – it was like coming up for air. With time, Oxford began to feel like a space for me, in my entirety, rather than a select manufactured appearance. Paired with the love-filled acceptance of my friends and most peers, who continue to help me feel more authentically myself by the day, I am forever grateful for my tutors’ kindness and genuine care for students of all backgrounds. When I did not feel like enough, they always reminded me that I was.
However, I recognise that my story is seemingly in the minority, and it is due in part to the fact that my sense of disconnect at Oxford was not from being marginalised or excluded, but rather from the perception of assimilation greater than I felt. For students who have accents which do face social marginalisation, their experiences greatly differ; the pressure to change can often be far stronger, and the consequences of not doing so are more cuttingly felt.
A Scottish undergraduate spoke to me of how she consciously altered her voice during tutorials and moots, where she would “tone down” the broadness of her accent. She found that when she did, she was treated with more respect, taken more seriously, and viewed as more intelligent. It helped protect her from having the experiences of a Mancunian undergraduate, who shared that a tutor repeatedly claimed to be unable to understand her. She was forced to repeat herself sentence after sentence in tutorials and classes, ostensibly in the name of “clarity.” Listening to her recount this, I could understand every word she said without difficulty. Her accent was perfectly comprehensible: the issue is the tutor’s prejudice. Her experience underscores the bias that exists within academic and professional settings toward Southern English accents, a bias that unfairly equates certain ways of speaking with intellectual worth.
A sense of worth is what this all comes back to: the desire to be treated with dignity and respect, where your right to belong is not measured by your accent or background. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that accents do act as a form of social currency. They can shield people from discrimination and open doors more easily. Amelia Taylor, Regions Officer at Class Act, told Cherwell, “[mocking accents] reinforces the sense of otherness at Oxford that is caused by regional disparities in deprivation and opportunity – so students from less well-represented regional backgrounds may not only have a harder time reaching Oxford, but have to battle with discrimination when they’re here”.
This reality forces us to ask: how much of yourself do you change to fit in? My decision to embrace self-authenticity and reject the belief that an Oxford student must look, act, or speak a certain way was liberating. But I recognise that others adjust their accent as a form of self-protection. It helps them blend in and access social and academic spaces that, in an unfair world, are more easily available to some than others. It is a cruel system with the weight of a long history behind it, but it is a ladder that can feel easier to climb than to dismantle. I know it is easy to preach authenticity when less is at stake.
I can only hope that Oxford is full of more love than judgement, with a bigger desire to embrace others rather than hurt them. Words and comments that stayed with me carried weight because of their sharpness, not their frequency, and I want to believe that Oxford’s classism persists more because of the loudness of voices that proclaim it than the number who share those beliefs. This University is for everyone, always. Therefore, in both small and large actions, the accent bias, and all forms of classism and prejudice, must be continually confronted and challenged.
