Please let me start this column with a declaration of interest, a confession of bias.

I belong to the Dennis the Menace Fan Club. My membership card is lost, along with the googly-eyed Gnasher badge that arrived with it one summer in nineteen-seventy-something. But I guess Dennis’s gang is like the Mafia: you can never really leave, however much you want to.

I am not sure I even liked The Menace that much. I remember being more of a Bash Street Kids kid. Signing up to that club - sending off a postal order - and getting some tat back was just what bairns did half a century ago.

Leafing through shared copies of the Beano was like watching Blue Peter or reading Enid Blyton.

Dennis was part of a largely shared but nevertheless limited, and seemingly monochrome, British children’s cultural offering.

Is he still? Or does he belong to one part of the UK rather than another? Recently there was a telling mini-story about The Beano’s star attraction.

Last month the British Government put up billboards claiming the rascal in the red and black striped jumper was “created in London and unleashed on 100 countries”.

That turned some Scots’ eyes googlier than Gnasher’s. Dennis? Created in London? The Menace was surely from Dundee, a product of the mighty DC Thomson?

An MP, Chris Law, lambasted the ad as “utter garbage” and suggested the false claim was “cultural appropriation”.

It turns out the marketing campaign was more cock-up than conspiracy, as these things tend to be.

Advertising people, who were bigging up a new animated series made in the UK capital, made a mistake, one they have now, to their credit, fixed.

As of this week, Dennis is Dundonian again.

On billboards at least. On air the lad who never grows out of mischief is still definitely from that Lahndahn, innit. How come? Because that is the voice he has been given in successive TV series, including the brand new one.

So it is maybe understandable spinners thought he was English: he certainly sounds it.

Which brings us to a question some readers will probably think is petty, trivial even, but which I see as really rather intriguing.

Why does Dennis the Menace not have a Scottish accent?

I guess I never thought about the character’s voice when I was a Beano reader. But I do remember first hearing his voice on TV and thinking “wait, Dennis is English?”

I am not saying I was annoyed; I was surprised. Unspoken childhood assumptions were shattered. There was nothing unusual in this: it is always odd to hear a character speak when they have just stepped off of the printed page and on to a screen.

Rob Drummond’s ears also pricked up when Dennis first appeared on TV. “I remember being really disappointed when I heard his voice,” said the professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. “I don’t know what accent I imagined, but it wasn’t that!”

In one of his latest TV incarnations, Dennis is voiced by the rather marvellous Freddie Fox. But the performer - a member, I guess, of British acting nobility - does not use his own RP, received pronunciation.

I don’t want to go all ‘Enry ‘Iggins here - I don’t have Pygmalion-style accent-placing skills - but it seems to me Mr Fox gives his character a Cockney twang. Again, why pick a working-class London voice and not a Dundee one?

Prof Drummond speculates that this is about money. “Honestly, I think it might have made Dennis too niche to give him a Scottish accent, in commercial terms,” he said. “Or, they might have been worried people would read something that wasn’t there into their accent choice. All of this is a shame, of course, but I guess they felt they were playing it safe by keeping it ‘neutral’.”

Not that Prof Drummond believes there is such a thing as a “neutral” accent. Linguists tend not to.

Indeed, the scholar has a readable new book out this week, You’re All Talk (£16.99, Scribe), helping us unpack some of our prejudices about the ways others speak, including in cartoons.

He cites the Disney hit The Lion King. Why did the baddie, Scar, have a RP accent? Why were his sidekicks, the Hyenas, audibly African-American? Why did goodies, including Scar’s brother Mustapha, talk in what is often seen, wrongly, as some kind of US standard?

We know this, right? We know that Hollywood villains sound disproportionately posh and English? Or frequently have - to use an unusually stupid formulation - “eastern European accents”? We know “regional” voices are less common on screen than in real life? Well, stats back this up.

In his book Prof Drummond quotes another linguist, Rosina Lippi-Green, on how this affects nippers. “Children are not passive vessels who sit in front of the TV and let stories float by them,” she explains. “What they take in is processed and added to the store of data on how things and people are categorised.”

Disney now pushes diversity (riling America’s far right as it does so). DC Thomson does too: its comics are now kinder.

Mind you, it is not long since The Beano’s editors were jokingly comparing Walter the Softy (Dennis’s nemesis, or homophobic bullying victim) to the RP-voiced Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Yet even in 2023 a Scottish comic-strip character still comes to life on our children’s screens as English. This may sound like a nothing-burger.

But it means somebody has decided a Dundee Dennis is less bankable than a Cockney one, that anglophone audiences would switch off a naughty Scots wean with a shock of black hair. And that, I am afraid, has real meaning: Britain is still not comfortable with its language diversity.

We don’t teach children any linguistics (as evidenced by the fingernails-on-the-blackboard screeching that passes for public debate on Scots, Gaelic and standards of English). But some us certainly pass on their ignorance and prejudice. Let’s quit that club.