Severus and his Northern Accent
Let's talk about accents.
One of my favourite headcanons is Severus' northern accent.
We know he was born into a poor working class family, so he will not have attended middle/upper class schools.
His accent for 11 years remained unchanged and I imagine when he met Lily he was speaking with that northern accent.
Lily was used to it, as she lived nearby, but coming from a more affluent family than Severus she must have spoken better English.
I can see the frightened eleven-year-old spying on Lily dreaming that he too had that graceful pronunciation 🥹
My Headcanon sees a willing and magnanimous Lucius taking his young companion under his wing and helping him with pronunciation.
Once he becomes an adult and prepares himself for the role of teacher, I believe he will have taken diction courses so that his English will be impeccable.
Of course (and I find this tremendously sensual) when he is unnerved or particularly stressed we could easily hear him swearing in his Northern accent 🫠🫠 or in his passionate moments in bed.
A small addition.
As a teacher myself, I have taken diction courses to improve my pronunciation, I am Italian but I was born in Rome.
The Italian language is varied because it has so many accents, some, like those of the south, are incomprehensible.
I compare my dialect (the Roman one) to the northern dialect of Severus.
We tend to double many letters, to weaken the letter 'r', to not use the letter 'u' for some words, to drop vowels at the beginning of words when they are followed by a consonant, to drop the 'l' in determinative articles, to reduce the letter 'V', to use the atonal particle '-ne' and much more...
Forgive me the phonetics lesson, but all this to tell you that I think it's very similar to Severus's juvenile accent 💚
To give you a better understanding of the Roman dialect, I post a song😄
This is a lovely, well thought out headcanon, though there is one wildcard we (myself included) often miss when theorizing about Severus's speech quality/accent. While he did grow up in a poor/working-class Muggle environment, the most influential person in his early life was his mother. While we don't know where she came from, it's safe to assume that both her background and accent differed from that of an average Muggle from Cokeworth.
Those differences would've had an effect on Severus, especially when you consider several other factors. He was much more comfortable with/influenced by her than his father, for one thing. Also, it's a given that parenting responsibilities fell disproportionately on her based on both the time period and Tobias's overall shittiness. That means that she would've been the one who taught Severus to talk and most of his verbal interactions would've been with her.
Accents and speech patterns are formed in our earliest years and are affected most significantly by those in our own household. We can certainly learn different ways of speaking later on, but it takes time and deliberate effort to fully replace those foundational patterns.
In other words, I don't think we can take it for granted that he had the standard working-class Muggle accent of that region. While I'm sure there were elements of that in his speech, Eileen and the influence she had on him are equally important, if not more so. That makes it even more interesting, IMO, and why I love Severus so much as a character. Everything about him is nuanced – you can't take anything, including his accent, at face value. 💚
My personal theory is that Eileen spoke more properly than Tobias and attemptedt to teach Severus to do the same. I doubt he would've taken it seriously as a child, especially compared to magic, but I can see him making more of an effort as he got older/started attending Hogwarts. I can totally picture him going out of his way to "speak properly" in class, only to fall back on more "common" ways of speaking in other situations (emotional, stressed out, etc). I see it as yet another facet of his persona as the HBP, one side of him directly contrasting the other and him struggling to reconcile the two. This is an overarching theme in virtually every aspect of his life… it only makes sense that it would be reflected in his accent/speech patterns as well.
Good headcanon. Based on Snape's wide reading at Hogwarts at least (and in all likelihood beforehand), he may have become accustomed to Standard English far quicker. The working-class accent can make itself seen through writing: "I shouldn't of done it."/"He were a good lad." Both are fine for informal speech, but grammatically incorrect in writing. Given how often Hogwarts Professors doled out essays for homework, Snape would have struggled long before becoming a teacher if he hadn't at least some familiarity with Standard English.
By northern inflection I mean the dialect of the cities in the north of England☺️
I report a reflection (since I also published this post in my blog) of a friend of mine who lives in the North of the UK.
“It doesn’t matter what class you are in the North. Everyone sounds ‘Northern.’ Deeper into the cities, accents tend to be stronger, and in the suburbs they’re usually less so, but people in the South tend to hear it all the same (I lived in London for a time and you wouldn’t believe how many people ‘couldn’t understand’ me 😒 my accent isn’t even strong. By northern standards 😂). Northern accents, when they’re stronger, can tend to sound a little more on the ‘aggressive’ side. Lily’s accent would likely have been very similar to Severus’s, but Severus may have used some dialect that wasn’t as commonly used in Lily’s house, or might have sounded a little more ‘aggressive’ if she came from the suburbs and he was raised in the city.
The accents in the North are very different from each other if you’re local to one place or another; each city has its own dialect and inflections which are generally influenced by the history of the towns (e.g. my home city was an affluent trading port going back hundreds of years, doing a lot of business with places in Europe and this influenced our pronunciation of vowels, for example, which sets us apart from another city which may have a more closed off sound due to a long history of working outside the cold). Northern people know which city they’re all from by picking up on these sounds. Going back to the North/South divide, in my experience, Southerners tend to view all Northerners as poor whether they are or not, so even if Severus wasn’t, James would likely still have heard his accent and thought it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘Do you have televisions up there?’ type questions from Southerners. Yes, really. Someone once actually said to me, ‘You’re from [home town]?? But you’re pretty?!’“
Good post, @giosnape. Thank you for sharing!
We have a similar dynamic in the Eastern US, though Northern and Southern are inverted. Over here, it's the Southern accent that's associated with people being ignorant/uneducated and other negative stereotypes.To be fair, this isn't entirely inaccurate... we do have plenty of people down here who are flat out dumb. 😂 But that's true for any region, and in my experience, the average Southerner is a normal, reasonably intelligent person that just happens to speak with a drawl.
Distinction between accents is another commonality. People from other regions often can't tell the difference between Southern accents, where those of us who are from here are able to hear a lot more nuance. I can easily tell what state someone is from based on their accent and can sometimes narrow it down to a specific part of that state. Someone from say, Texas or Louisiana sounds very different than a person from Georgia, and there are distinct differences between say, coastal North Carolina and the middle of the state. There are also class elements, even though class isn't as much of a focal point over here as it is in England. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, a thicker drawl and incorrect grammar are more of a working class thing, while upper class folks are more influenced by standard American English.
I grew up working class, but my family is also big on education. I've always been a voracious reader as well, so I speak and write more properly than most with similar backgrounds. That said, I was surrounded by working class influences as I grew up... I can definitely talk like a redneck, which I've been known to do when angry or drunk. 😂
