People, who are not sure about themselves, are less likely to use local accents, as they fear about not fitting in to the wider society, an academic has claimed. Clive Upton, Professor of Modern English Language at Leeds University, said that people who are “comfortable in their skin” were more likely to use local dialects than people unsure of themselves, the Telegraph reported.

He said that people, who were sure about themselves, were able to slide between the standard and the non-standard and fit in easily.

Upton said that people deployed different ways of speech in different situations in order to smoothen their passage. He also said that people didn’t want to sound the same as each other.