When I was growing up, regional accents were quite firmly delineated. If you came from Birmingham, for example, you spoke Brummie. That is, unless you were posh. In which case, wherever you lived, you spoke the same BBC English – or received pronunciation. Speaking ‘correctly’ was a determiner of class, like a grounding in Latin. If you met someone who spoke RP, you knew they’d probably had a similar education. Even today, when certain people ask, ‘where did you go to school?’ what they really mean is, ‘which public school did you go to?’
I once spent two miserable months working in a housing association, where my accent made me a target for some of my less open-minded colleagues
The problem with ‘talking posh’ when I was growing up was that you stuck out. Attempts to disguise my accent made me sound ridiculous. If I adopted the local vernacular, my dad would bellow: ‘I haven’t paid good money for you to sound like that!’ Speaking the way I did could lead to awkwardness. My friends who went to the local school had such thick accents I often had to ask them to repeat themselves. If I met anyone from further afield, they might as well have been speaking Chinese.
Leaving the rarefied world of public school brought me into more contact with people who spoke colloquial English. The job I had before going to university required neither qualifications nor skills. My accent made me a source of fascination to my workmates. I was treated as a kind of exotic animal; ‘ark at ee,’ they’d exclaim. Having also had elocution lessons, I must have been a dead-ringer for Little Lord Fauntleroy.
I once spent two miserable months working in a housing association, where my accent made me a target for some of my less open-minded colleagues. In their opinion, my private school education meant I lacked empathy with our largely poor clients. I couldn’t be bothered to tell them that I wasn’t actually posh. My dad had just paid a fortune for me to sound the way I did.
However, in the intervening years, accents have become more fluid. The patrician voices of old television and radio presenters have been replaced by a more representative spread of accents. Even the royals speak differently. If you listen to recordings of the late Queen when she was a girl compared to when she was old, the difference is marked. Those sharp vowels softened considerably.
Where being posh was once a source of status, these days, it can make you a target of resentment or even hate. Ordering a pint in a braying voice at your local won’t win you any friends. Any deference to poshness has long gone. Former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming recently told followers on X/Twitter that she no longer gets offered work because of her RP accent.
So, when I hear the plummy voices of the kids who go to my old school, I think wryly, ‘you’re not going to last five minutes in the real world sounding like that’. My accent is more neutral now. I haven’t consciously changed it, but it’s modified over time as I’ve lived in other places, travelled, and generally met a mix of people. There are probably subtle changes as I ‘code-switch’ (to use the current lingo) depending on whom I’m talking to. The chummy tone I adopt for builders – ‘Alright, mate? D’you fancy a brew?’ – is replaced by something slightly more affected if I’m ordering at a fancy restaurant. Nobody wants to be thought of as phoney. Who remembers the ridicule Fettes-educated Tony Blair got for his attempt at mockney?
Anyway, cockney is now facing extinction, with the children of most speakers talking in Estuary English, which is widely used in the south east around London. There can’t be too many youngsters today who’ve been told to: ‘Shut yer bleedin cake ole.’ Meanwhile, Standard Southern British English has largely replaced received pronunciation.
So RP has become an anachronism. Some may see it as an erosion of standards and fulminate over the increasing use of sloppy English, but speaking clearly and precisely is not predicated on having a particular accent. Although, admittedly, some people’s diction is appalling: including notable individuals in public life. But that is another matter.
Comments