My grandmother taught how to rrrrrrol my rrrrrrrrs.....
Scottish – Probably the Best Accent In the World…
Englishmen have been known to migrate to Los Angeles and return home a scant few months later with a Californian twang stretched across their vowels. American girls will come to work in London and then jet back across the Atlantic sporting shiny new Kensington-influenced accents. However, the chances are that if you dropped a Scotsman into the middle of the Amazonian jungle, where they had to live with the forest people for twenty years, and have no contact with any other Scots, they would still speak like a Scot. In fact it's very likely that the jungle people themselves would all be talking in thick Glaswegian accents. Why? Because, according to an increasingly persuasive amount of research, everyone wants to sound Scottish nowadays. . .
In a recent survey commissioned by the communications group The Aziz Corporation, 55% of business executives said they believed that Scots accent was desirable in business because it conveyed 'above average honesty in the personality of its owner.' Compare this with the survey scores of our United Kingdom counterparts, with some English regional accents scoring as little as 22% and you begin to get an idea of why the Scots accent is so highly prized in the worlds of advertising and telemarketing. The same survey threw up some other interesting statistics: 63% of people believed that if they meet someone with a Scottish accent in a business capacity, they will generally believe that the person is successful. The Aziz Corporation's chairman Khalid Aziz said, 'If you want to get ahead in business. . .it is better to sound as if you are from Scotland than from any English region.' Or, as one female advertising executive, puts it – 'the Scottish accent sells.'
But perhaps this isn't so surprising when we consider the effects the Scots have wrought in the world of cinema. Are there many women over forty who don't go weak at the knees at the sound of Sir Sean Connery's silky purr? Or many women under forty who don't have the same reaction when they hear Ewan McGregor's honey-dipped tones?
