A WOMAN goes into a Glasgow butcher shop and asks: “Is that yer Ayrshire bacon?”

“Naw,” replies the butcher. “It’s jist ma haun’s Ah’m heatin’.”

Such gags are all in the telling and hinge on local lingo, as has been echoed this past week in France, where it also turns out that it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it.

When prime minister Jean Castex speaks, he is often accused of being “a bit rugby”, hailing as he does from the south-west of the country, where the sport is popular.

Now the French have not only come up with a word for this kind of prejudice – glottophobie – but a new law banning it. The Assemblée Nationale has adopted legislation making linguistic discrimination an offence along with racism, sexism and other outlawed bigotry.

The legislation, approved by 98 votes to three, was the subject of acute debate in the house.

Among those who voted against was Jean Lassalle, a former presidential candidate, the head of the Libertés et Territoires (Freedom and Land) party and a well-known orator.

“I’m not asking for charity. I’m not asking to be protected. I am who I am,” he said in his blunt south-west accent. Parisians were choking on their croissants.

Christophe Euzet, who proposed the law, said: “At a time when visible minorities benefit from the legitimate concern of public powers, the audible minorities are the poor cousins of the social contract based on equality,” he said.

Several MPs, including one from French Polynesia and another the daughter of parents repatriated to France around Algerian independence in the 1960s, made their voices heard. Other parliamentarians complained that many broadcasters with strong regional accents were pigeonholed into reporting on rugby matches or delivering the weather.

It is not recorded whether the Moroccan-born, Paris-adopted firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon contributed to the debate, but he can count himself lucky having narrowly escaped potentially facing a €45,000 fine and three years in jail for blatant glottophobie. When a journalist with a strong southern accent addressed him recently, he replied: “Can someone ask me a question in French? And make it a bit more understandable.”

He should actually just have been fined for being rude and unkind.

I’d never really thought about accents until I arrived at Edinburgh University as a nervous 18-year-old. I had a notion to take a crash Italian course as an extra subject, but there was only room for 40 in the class, and competition was stiff.

I was amazed to get a place, and then felt weirdly uncomfortable as a Scot at a Scottish university for being the only Scottish spoken person in the cohort. My fellow students, it seemed, were there to brush up before heading to their family villas in Tuscany for the summer.

I should not have been daunted, however. Pure Scottish vowels are far more conducive to Italian pronunciation than the rolling vowels of the Home Counties.

The Scot had the last risata after all.