Not what you say but how you say iT

ALWIGHT me old china! You 'ad a butcher's at me CV then?

A pitch like this probably wouldn't go down well at an interview for talking like a regular Del Boy, or with another strong regional accent, apparently affects how you're judged in the business world.

In a recent study 46 per cent of British company bosses admitted a strong brogue is a disadvantage and causes them to judge how successful, hard-working or honest someone is.

Historically, working-class accents like Cockney, Scouse, Brummie and the West Country burr are worst effected by the stereotype.

Sure enough, only nine per cent of those quizzed in the survey of 100 directors by image experts the Aziz Corporation viewed Scousers as hard-working, while 16 per cent admitted they might think of a Cockney as less likely to be honest than people from other areas.

Khalid Aziz, chairman of the Aziz Corporation says: "The fact remains it is not what you say, but the way you say it."

Two household names who have taken this kind of advice on board and modified their accents for the sake of their careers are broad-casters Sue Lawley and Joan Bake-well.

Brummie-born Lawley adopted the 'posh' BBC tongue, while Bakewell, from Stockport, admits that she consciously dropped her northern lilt on arriving at Cambridge University.

But does a strong regional accent really count against you that much?

Andrew Jack a dialect coach who taught Irishman Pierce Brosnan to perfect his British accent for James Bond in GoldenEye believes it does.

Having coached people who feel their career has ground to a halt because of the way they talk, he says: "If you work in a large company and you speak with a strong accent it doesn't matter where it's from it's a disadvantage.

"An accent can imply a certain type of person. We get a general idea of people based on what they sound like, whether it's true or not.

"People will have suspicions about who you are, how much money you have in the bank, the kind of woman or man you're married to, whether you have children, or what you like to do in your free time.

"About ten or 15 years ago, London and Glasgow were almost at the bottom of the league. If you spoke with these accents people did not trust you and did not think you had much intelligence.

"And today we still class everyone with a certain accent together and say, 'Oh yes, you have a Cockney accent you must be a dodgy car salesman,' and of course it's not true."

So, strong accents are a problem if we want to get ahead. But what to do about it? Should we all strive to talk 'properly' a la Michael Buerk?

Jack thinks it's not about speaking properly but making yourself more widely understood by learning received pronunciation the way you say the words rather than which words you choose to use without losing too much of your personality.

He says: "You lose part of the communicative power of language with a regional accent, whereas if you use received pronunciation there is a good chance most people throughout the country will understand you and consider you as being intelligent, trustworthy and so on that is why people on the TV strive to get it.

"It's an organic thing. It's like changing your diet. You are changing your life your whole approach to thinking. As soon as you start to change your accent it affects how you feel and how you feel affects the way you speak.

"The difficulty is that so much of our personality and persona is pinned in with the accent so you have to be very careful you do not lose the individual."

It sounds like quite a tricky business so how should you go about it?

Judy Apps, a voice coach at Enlightened Training, says it's not about losing your accent but about learning to vary your voice to help you in the business world.

She explains: "If people are difficult to understand, they seek to make their speaking more easily understood just as Robin Cook did not change their accent.

"They are seeking to sound more interesting and more varied or, if their accent is a bit flat, they might want to sound more dynamic."

And some accents, she says, more commonly create a negative impression: "Some people from the South West or with that Essex sound want to change their accents as people perhaps associate it with soap operas and being a bit dumb.

"A lot of people who come from places which are disadvantaged blame their accents for making them sound bad but in fact, it's not that, it's that their voice is not doing what it needs to do."

People can start training their voice in five coaching sessions, according to Judy, by doing a series of exercises involving one-on-one conversation, breathing, word lists and pronunciation coaching.

But there's also a psychological side to it. Judy says: "You learn to produce voices which come from all over the body so if people want to sound angry or confident they have the voice that comes from the chest that sounds as if they mean business.

"Or you can access your head voice if you want to be passionate.

"It's about getting access to the whole range of feelings and emotions that a voice tends to express and then people really understand and believe what you are saying."