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

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 12/5/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> 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

And Mark Liberman covers the specifics of the research:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003859.html


--Ben Zimemr

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