British accent stereotypes - 'news'

[sagehen]

on 4/4/08 12:20 PM, Charles Doyle at cdoyle at UGA.EDU wrote:

> Case in point . . . .
>
> Just a few moments ago in class, mentioning some prominent imagery patterns in
> a Jacobean play, I pronounced the word "forehead" in my customary way, [farId]
> (the second vowel may be a barred-"i"). Half the students professed not to
> know what word I was uttering; the other half delicately referred to my
> pronunciation as "something out of _Deliverance_"). And this is in Georgia!
>
> --Charlie
~~~~~~~~~
Ask them to recite:
There was a little girl, and she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good, she was very very good
And when she was bad, she was horrid!
~~~~~~~~~~
The disappearance of accent  class markers in England is hardly brand new. A
good many of the kids in the middle-to-upper-middle class public school our
kids attended nearly 40 years ago affected a decidedly down-market speech.
Maybe the Beatles phenom had something to do with this.
AM

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