changing one's accent from posh to a little less posh

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 12/5/06, Alice Faber <faber at haskins.yale.edu> wrote:
>
> RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
> > By the way, no one has yet taken notice of the article in the press today
> > about the phonetics professor in Munich who has been studying the accent of the
> > present Queen of England (the one who is not bald) by looking at recordings of
> > her formal speeches made over the past 50 years. It appears that Queen
> > Elizabeth II has become much more demotic in her accent over the years.
>
> I remember this being reported, with a bit more fanfare, some 4 years
> ago, perhaps on the occasion of her Jubilee.

J.C. Wells has some coverage from 2000 on his Estuary English site:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/queen.htm
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/queen2.htm


--Ben Zimmer

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