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

[Alison Murie]

Chris 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.
>>[...]
>>
>
>This has been widely reported in the UK press (see for example
>http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1111708880), and
>it is not for the first time. Last year in September, the -- overall
>very good -- BBC Radio 4 Word4Word series of programs mentioned it, too.
>(I happen to have recordings of all episodes.)
>
>A relatively typical example from the Daily Telegraph, for your, um,
>amusement:
>
>====
>As the common tongue continues its inexorable slide towards a new dark
>age of glottal stops and "innits", news comes that even the Queen is
>drifting slowly down river towards Estuary English.
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/04/nqueen04.xml
>====
I remember noticing this deposhing among the boarding school mates of our
kids in Herts  back in '69-'70.  It was more pronounced among the sixth
formers than among the younger kids.  A year or two later, back in the
states,  it was still more noticeable  in a schoolmate who came to visit.
The deposhing was partly sliding down the Brit class scale and partly
Americanisation.  (Our kids, in their year's schooling  there didn't have
their vowels much affected or become non-rhotic, but their speech did show
some of the greater tonal spread  and different rhythms of Brit English,
thereafter.)
AM

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