Perhaps even more so

"Perhaps even more so."The sociolinguist Professor Peter Trudgill says Britain is unique in its development of a single prestigious accent that still dominates even though it is spoken by only 2 per cent of the population It remains the accent of authority. "Accent matters as much as it ever did," says Professor Crystal. But Professor Crystal says nothing has changed since the days when the broadcaster Sue Lawley - as a student, according to legend - began eradicating her Black Country accent in favour of BBC English, otherwise known as Received Pronunciation (RP) to improve her career chances, and a young Mandi Norwood, a decade before she became editor of Cosmopolitan, decided to move in with a Sloane to suffocate the Newcastle accent she grew up with. We fool ourselves that Britain these days is a meritocracy in which accent and dialect do not matter. You are usually on your guard to speak like they do but when you relax you slip back into your own language."The power of accent to determine your social chances cannot be underestimated.

My accent is associated with stupidity and ignorance and I think that has limited my career. There are always those who will use the accent against me, crack jokes to bring me down. You laugh but at times you wish the ground would open and swallow you. "When I went to grammar school I was so conscious of not fitting in that I considered elocution lessons But that would have hurt my parents Now my colleagues are middle-class South-easterners. But those who suffer are shy of publicity."I've had to laugh it off all my life," says Susan, 33, an advertising executive, a Brummie who works in London. It is so closely related to your sense of identity."Mrs Yates was apparently so miserable she was often in tears The experience is hardly uncommon.

"Their reaction ranged from getting upset, to resigning and moving house - even to committing suicide. For attacks on the accent, he argues, are an assault at the very heart of the person. And some victims of accent attack, he says, have been driven far beyond finding another job."When I worked for Radio 4's English Now we got hundreds of letters from people penalised because of their accents," he says. Is that not what people with those accents are supposed to do: act the clown and take it on the chin; not develop a boring chip on their shoulder? After all, it wasn't a personal attack on her; just a harmless little go at her accent.Wrong, says Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. All this from "posher" workmates who put petrol in the cahh rather than the car, or else who now fly the flag of Estuary English, an accent typified by Jonathan Ross that originated in the South-east and is now so beloved by the young and hip that it has spread as far north as Hull.Wasn't it all just a little fun between colleagues? Why could Mrs Yates not just settle into the reassuring, stereotypical role so nicely reinforced by the Wurzels in their classic anthem to the West Country, "I got a brand new combine 'arvester"? She could have taken to saying oo arrh and chewing straw.

But that was positively polite compared to workmates' jokes about Mrs Yates, a secretary with seven O- levels, being a "thick yokel". "Anyone might have to put up with a certain level of teasing but with me it was every day," she says. Mrs Yates, 22, is apparently so distraught that she has changed jobs three times since moving from Bristol two years ago But the "relentless" daily jibes continue. One employer apparently asked her not to answer the phone because it put customers off. Recognising the authority in his voice - as a summation of Dickie Davies' career, it couldn't be bettered..