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In the end, prejudice against accents betrays bad manners and small minds, and says more about the listener than about the put-upon speaker. But often it is itself a sign of poor education. As it happens, Mr Campbell’s swipe at Ms Patel’s “g-dropping” was badly aimed. There is no actual “g” sound (as in “go”) at the end of words ending in -ing; rather, there is a “velar nasal”, in which the mouth is closed off at the back and air comes from the nose. And the -in’ pronunciation he mocks (as in walkin’) was the “correct” one for centuries, remaining prestigious in the early 1900s.
最后，對口音的偏見也更多的暴露出傾聽者的不禮貌和心胸狹窄，而不是受到嘲弄的說話者。但這本身往往是教育水平低下的表現。恰巧，坎貝爾對帕特爾“未發g音”的抨擊針對性很差。在以-ing結尾的單詞的末尾沒有實際的“g”音（如“go”）；相反，有一個“軟顎鼻音”，即發音時口腔后部閉塞，空氣從鼻逸出。坎貝爾嘲笑的-in’的發音（如walkin’）在幾個世紀以來卻一直是“正確”的，在20世紀初仍然享有威望。
If more of this were taught in British schools, snobbery would seem irrational. French children might be told that Parisian French was a latecomer, as prestige dialects in France go. Provencal, from France’s south, was the language of poetry when the speech of Paris’s Ile-de- France region was a trivial local patois.
如果英國學校教授更多這方面的知識，自以為優越的態度就顯得很荒謬。法國孩子可能會被告知，隨著法國的權威方言漸衰，巴黎法語后來居上。來自法國南部的普羅旺斯是詩歌的語言，當時巴黎法蘭西地區的說話方式只是一種微不足道的當地方言。
Speakers of prestigious accents are lucky that they do not face scorn for their speech. But it is just that—luck, not superior learning or care. A law may modify behaviour, but education is a better way to change attitudes.
講著權威方言的人不會受到嘲笑，他們很幸運。但這只是運氣，不代表著你經歷過良好的學習和照顧。法律可以改變行為，但教育才是改變態度的最好辦法。
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