George Bernard Shaw famously said: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” Accents are a key badge of geographical and social identity: indeed, the drive to display and reinforce our tribal allegiances may have been crucial for the evolution of human language itself.

Read “The Darwinian science behind Ashes sledging”, published in the Australian Financial Review in December 2013.