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

[Jonathan Lighter]

A few years ago I heard a recording of George V (1865-1936), made, IIRC, about 1920. FWIW, his accent sounded to me, quite surprisingly, far more "mid-Atlantic" than that of his granddaughter.

  Just a factoid for consideration.

  JL
RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
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Subject: changing one's accent from posh to a little less posh
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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.

This reminds me of an observation that I received from a famous and brilliant
English professor of forensic linguistics this summer whilst watching (in his
living room) a rerun of one of the old "I Claudius" series (made in the early
1980s, I believe, if not the later 1970s). My friend indicated that the
accents sounded old-fashioned and quaintly hyper-posh (lest I be accused of being a
liar for paraphrasing, those are NOT his EXACT words, but rather my sense of
his exact words, sorta like the difference between ''prejudice'' and
''bias'').

How much attention is being given to the deposhing of England, accentwise? Do
all those sexy princes sound different from their homely dad?

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