The Year That Killed Received Pronunciation (RP)
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- čas přidán 12. 05. 2024
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Practically the moment the familiar vowel symbols for British English were published, they plummeted drastically out of fashion. This video explains how and why.
0:00 Introduction
1:04 MyHeritage
2:45 A. C. Gimson's book
5:33 The 1960's
10:30 Advanced RP
14:02 Beautiful working class?
16:18 Satirizing RP
17:35 Stigmatization of poshness
18:08 Relaxing the front vowels
20:00 What didn't change
21:46 The fate of the term 'RP'
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well integrated into the video, ill get the trial, im curious
I'm sold! First time I've followed a link from a YT video. My dad started logging the family history over 20 years ago. Considering we have a really unusual surname it's odd that he couldn't get back more than 200 years. I know my parents DoBs, but no further back; Dad is 91 so a bit late to ask for his parents' this late. I'll need to pester Dad tomorrow.
Have been building my family tree with MyHeritage since 2018, and also took their DNA-test. Have made lots of discoveries on both my British and Norwegian side of my family. Can highly recommend!
NEVER give any biological sample to ANY company that offers to tell you some things. Why do you think it's free?
Do you teach improved accents?
As a Canadian raised on Monty Python, I thought making fun of the upper class had ALWAYS been been a part of British identity. Fascinating.
Well, you can find examples of the silly ass like Bertie Wooster, but it was new to treat the whole class as a joke.
@@DrGeoffLindsey That´s the point! The leading class (and traditional social conventions) had always been joked about, but never treated as a joke .... until the dire Sixties came along
It always has been, you can see this in print media going back centuries, however radio and TV were initially the playgrounds of the upper classes. That broke down in the 60s, first by an invasion of upper class comedians willing to mock other upper class figures and poshness in general, and gradually the old boys network breaking down after that.
Personally I take the viewpoint that the *perceived* popularity of RP was the outlier, an artificial product of the temporary dominance of class barriers in the new forms of mass media that conveyed an accent for the first time, but I imagine there's historians who have far better knowledge of the subject than me.
As a Polish raised on Monty Python - same here :)
The fact that it was so popular in its time testifies to how unusual it was.
Alternative title: that was the accent that was.
Excellent. If only it started with a W
Not at all. Both ELF teachers in particular and attentive first-language English tutors know that this is far from being the case and the trend is markedly in the opposite direction among the young.
@@B_Ruphe What is ELF? English as a Language Foreign? :D Do you have any studies that show what you say to be true?
@@MatthewMcVeagh ELF is English as a Lingua Franca. It is hardly an obscure term in the English language teaching sphere. Large ELF movement in continental Europe. Probably less so out in the far west. ELF is rather at odds with mainstream EFL/ESOL thinking, since it promotes the notion of the inevitability of non-native teachers becoming the dominant force in ELT, by and by. ELF learners largely learn through CLIL.
@@B_Ruphe OK, but it sounds like you're talking about non-native speakers adopting it. I can believe that, although I think with time it's probably going to fade away there too. I've also never heard a full RP accent from a non-native speaker, and I wonder how close the accents learned by ELF learners are.
I started learning English in the Soviet Union at the very end of 80s.
We were supposed to learn RP from these squiggles, and maybe some old and well worn reel to reel tapes that were played in class once or twice.
We also learned that there's 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, and other such nonsense. We were tested on that, apparently this was important knowledge. I think the textbooks may have been a little out of date.
We also learned German from pre-war era textbooks. It's absurd remembering how we were taught in comparison with the language spoken today.
I suspect the most up-to-date language curriculum must have been Latin.
It is fascinating learning about the 20th century being a Gen Z guy born in 2000. I can not conceive of a world where foreign languages were that foreign.
You used to have tape and books, while now every language is accessible everywhere all at once in digital platform through the internet. Gone are the days of our American Code-Talkers
Yes, learning about the old currency in the 80s was somewhat outdated, that system ended in 1971, some aspects remained though, such as 20 shillings in a pound, a shilling took the new value of 5 pence.
When I meet my Finnish ex I started learning the language with the only book I could get my hands on (no real Internet in those days.).
A language dictionary for the German soldier from 1941.
My ex had lots of fun with my vocabulary. 🤣
I don't have any stories to tell about language, but I still feel betrayed by my American school system because in the early 70s, they told us we needed to learn the metric system because that's what we would all be using in the USA when we grew up. 🙄 For grades 1-6, I was in an American school for missionary kids in the Philippines (2 years in an international school but it wasn't much different) but I'm pretty sure my peers back in the US were being told the same thing. Liars!! 😂 Somehow Britain managed to go metric, at least for most things, but Americans obviously weren't going to stand for such nonsense. 😝
My formal education has consisted of dead languages, hence I don't care what the slang of the week is for jaggoffs.
As an American, those comedy sketches would have completely baffled me if you had not told me that they were making fun of the accent.
Same here, and my mom was a real anglophile. She even married a Brit later in life!
"Pardon me, Mater, I'm off to play the GRAHND PEEAHNO!! Excuse me while I fly in my AEROPLANE!!" It all makes sense now!
When someone told me they were doing that in Monty Python, I was like "Oooohhh...." I had no idea
Also that Jack Whitehalls speech is immediately recognizable as posh. As an American I never would have thought about that😂
As a British-Australian same.
I left the UK in 76 for the USA. When I saw the movie Attack the Block and it's young Londoners I realized that the accent I had grown up with was becoming a fossil.
"Allow it!"
Looks like you got while the gettin' was good, pod'ner.
yep or as we used to say. yorp@@misterwhipple2870
Trust.
@@misterwhipple2870 The gettin' in the UK was already very bad in 1976,much worse than it is even now unless you're talking about demographics in which case no comment lol
A smaller but equally rapid change took place in Sweden at around the same time. In the late 1960s, over the course of just a couple of years, the entire population went from addressing other people using formal titles, last names or "polite" pronouns, to using the informal second-person singular "du" (cognate with "thou", of course) throughout all levels of society. It hugely simplified interactions with people you before the change wouldn't have been on a first-name basis with. Instead of having to figure out what title to use, or resorting to convoluted and bizarre indirect sentence structures, everyone could just use one simple word. It made social interactions much less stressful and it helped lessen the gap between social classes.
I spent a semester in Paris in 1969. As an American it was a minefield to negotiate the formal and informal forms of address especially since we were only taught the formal forms in our French classes. It was just as much a problem if you addressed someone as "vous" when you ought to use "tu". Just a nightmare.
@@bevinboulder5039 This is actually a problem I have with modern French teaching too. Classes are still not great at teaching the circumstances in which to use 'tu' and 'vous', but I do think it's been getting better (the fact that the informal seems to be creeping into higher and higher social registers helps). However, to this day, French classes will teach the first-person plural as "nous", despite the fact that as a subject pronoun "on" is far and away the more current form for most interactions.
And yet they teach "on" as an afterthought, maybe mention that it's used for "we", but brush it aside after that and keep on teaching "nous" as the default.
@@bevinboulder5039When I first came in France in 1990, I had already completed a one-year course of French based on a textbook printed in France. It advised to greet unknown women via "Je suis enchantée". I remember this was hilarious for the French, especially young ones, who certainly had never heard it spoken in a place other than a theater.
@@zbigniewkoza1973 OMG! They're still doing it.
@@marsdeat Not surprised. Taking this opportunity to say that learning French messed up my ability to spell English. I still keep trying to spell surprise with a "z"
"This whirlwind of social change had phonetic consequences" is the greatest line ever uttered in a history documentary.
“An* history” 😉
@@MrOtistetrax...no?
@@MrOtistetrax 'An' is only possible if the following syllable is weak, as in 'an historic event'. It's related to the fact that the /h/ can be dropped. Or maybe you were joking.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Hi Dr Geoff. Yeah, it was a weak attempt at a joke.
@@MrOtistetrax If you ’ave an accent that drops the aitches, sure. "An historic" is an outlier brought about by the initial syllable being unaccented and partly reduced.
In the late 1970's we had a next door neighbor, the Bakers. He was American ands managed the local hardware store. His wife was English, spoke with a very pompous and very posh RP accent. I don't know how posh she was in England, but while he was very down to earth and quite friendly, she gave the impression that she considered herself well above those in her social circle and according to my parents, not very popular.
I'm not sure she was entirely happy being married to a man who ran a shop, but he provided for his family well enough. The daughter was my age and we even dated a bit in high school.
The house we lived in was part of a brand new development, and my family was the first to move into the street.
The yards were all undone, and my dad delighted in having a yard to design. He worked as a welder and he built a heavy duty utility trailer and he let my sister (6) and me (8) choose the color.
It was 1978 and we picked the brightest, most obnoxious color we could find. A super bright, day glow green.
Dad kept the trailer next to the house and it lit up everything in green.
We were all extremely delighted when the English neighbor complained that the trailer "Offended the finer senses." She was right, and that was the point.
When dad got his yard installed he sold the trailer to a guy with a landscaping business.
I happened to see him, he still had the trailer after owning it for 20 years.
I walked up to the guy and asked him about it. I asked if he had it pained that color, or had repainted that color. He said, "No. The man I bought the trailer from said his kids chose the color. I purchased it because I had an accident with another driver who said he did not see the old trailer."
I smiled and said, "Well, I'm glad my sister and I picked a good color no one would miss even 20 years later."
We laughed and he said no one ever failed to see the trailer.
It still offended the finer senses.
This reminded me of something I heard from a retired FBI agent who joined the FBI around 1940. He was talking about the rules J. Edgar Hoover had established. One was that all employees had to speak with something close to what he thought of as an American mid-western accent (Which was close to what you heard in the American Hollywood movies of the time.). This was to ensure accurate communications. Any applicant that had a strong regional accent would be rejected.
That automatically excludes those who speak with a "blackcent". 😆
Probably an old version of General American.
@@GizmoFromPizmoRednecks need not apply. Including the ones in the MidWest.
I don’t know about the past but having moved to the Midwest, I have encountered people with what I consider as strong regional accents. I am from Southern California. A lot of MW people sound flat and nasal to me. Many pronounce their vowels differently than I do. Roof sounds like rough. As and Os are oftentimes dragged out here. I have mistaken some Northern MD people for Canadians or Scandinavians.
@GizmoFromPizmo Yeah, AAVE definitely comes to mind. This just sounded like the kind of rule that would exclude most immigrants, minorities, etc, without "appearing racist" on paper. It also sounds like a myth they would intentionally perpetuate so their non-midwestern-accented undercover agents could more easily infiltrate groups. xD
At the same time The Beatles were making a working class Liverpool accent more acceptable in Britain, their producer, George Martin, was using an affected upper class British accent to make himself more acceptable in business and social circles. Things were definitely changing.
What was GM's natural accent?
@@WhiteCamry I don’t remember. I once watched an interview in which he discussed it. He said his posh accent was fake but his wife’s was real. There is a lengthy Wikipedia article on him but, as an America, the various place names where he was born and lived are meaningless to me.
And old Brian too.
Code switching, another psychotic human creation
He first adopted the RP accent as a naval officer in WW2. Coming from north London, most likely he would have grown up sounding (mildly) Cockney.
The Advanced RP of the UK was mirrored by a similar trend in American accents at prestigious, private schools. (This was still the era of the mid-Atlantic accent in Hollywood). Look to the character of Gloria Upson in the 1958 movie Auntie Mame. Her affected accent has many of the same vowel sounds as Advanced RP. Which are most easily made by jutting it your jaw and locking it in place.
I learned that as "Locust Valley Lockjaw"
Is that like the “Transatlantic” accent of someone like William F. Buckley?
Is that like the “Transatlantic” accent of someone like William F. Buckley?
Is that like the “Transatlantic” accent of someone like William F. Buckley?
@@placebojesus5652 that's a "Yale accent" although also noticeable in the alumni of other Ivy League schools at that time. Note that Buckley first enrolled at the National Autonomous University of Mexico until 1943, then after serving in the US Army, he attended Yale. It's also the accent of Thurston Howell in the show Giligan's Island.
Also, Cary Grant tried to imitate this accent in his early career, and did so badly, but with such consistent effort, that it his accent became his own exclusive "trademark". Upper-class Americans didn't feel their speech was being made fun of, there was no real resemblance to it, while lower class understood he was speaking in some sort of accent that identified "poshness", even though it wasn't a real accent of anyone else. Could even have been interpreted as a foreign accent, as if he was a recent but well-educated immigrant! He was not, of course.
As a non-native english speaker (and having never lived in a english speaking country) I don't relate british dialects/sosiolects to class as brits do. But I must say that what you describe as old fashioned RP (like the queen spoke) is much easier to understand and more pleasant to listen to than most speakers today. Thats the impression of most people I know.
agreed
I think that’s why international audience enjoy listening to Attenborough’s narration
Absolutely. And the glottal stop instead of T's is so vulgar, ew.
RP was certainly lovely to listen to. The mockery of the '60s generation which consigned RP to the dustbin ushered in an era of endlessly lowering standards in speech. Nowadays, people's accents, grammar, diction, etc, are in a lamentable state. So I, for one, do not celebrate the demise of RP.
@@ChrisLonsdale67What you call a lamentable state is actually just language changing.
Perhaps one lesson is that if you want to kill off some form of speech, you should write a book declaring that it is the new standard!
I wonder if that will happen with some of the recent changes in third-person pronouns in English, which are so hotly defended and increasingly enforced.
@@KateGladstone When I was in school I remember being marked down in my essay writing for using the pronoun “they” and told to use the more cumbersome “he or she.” I think what is more likely is that gender specific pronouns like he or she will be used less and less.
That is exactly correct! Those are the kinds of times we live in.
@@KateGladstone are the words themselves being enforced, or just tolerance for people's identity? i don't think anyone is being asked to use "they" for people who aren't non-binary. we make up a very small proportion of the population too, so it seems unlikely to have much effect on the language as a whole other than slightly increased use of a few specific words.
it'll be interesting to see what happens with romantic languages though, and others that are fully gendered.
@@jazztrombone I specifically asked an English teacher for one of my classes if singular "they" was acceptable to use in essays for his class. He was fine with it, so there seems to be at least some changing attitudes. Not the least because it's a very old usage of the word and it's quite common in informal speech for people of unknown or irrelevant gender.
With regard to the change of social perceptions of accents, something I stumbled upon recently was that you can find recordings of election results programmes from different years on CZcams. This was fascinating to me as you can see how the speech of the presenters change over time.
They always inherently tend towards formal and "posh" speech as heavyweight political TV commentators, and the event itself is one of the most formal and "serious" on TV, so it's hardly a snapshot of normal speech, and the speech on such programmes will always appear rather stuffy and formal, even slightly archaic at the time of broadcast, but it's a constant setting that you can compare throughout the years. (And you hear the contrast of the "posh, presentery" with regional accents from candidates and pundits in any single programme)
So I was looking through some of these, fascinated at hearing the historic accents, when I stumbled into the 1997 coverage, when I was a couple of years too young to vote, but definitely remember watching it all at the time. (I very dimly recall 1992, but 1997 was really my "first" election as an observer) And I was struck by how almost comically archaic some of the accents sounded! Yet, I never had this sense at the time. It would have sounded a bit stuffy, sure, but not amusingly alien. A real eye-opener on how much my own perceptions must have changed with the changing of the language!
Yes, a treasure trove.
You should listen to how journalism royalty, Kate Adie's accent changed over the years. It's quite astonishing.
And - to combine a couple of themes here - Monty Python’s “Election coverage” sketch makes fun of this very point.
A lovely example of the rise in acceptance of regional accents can be heard in the BBC documentary about the climbing of The Old Man of Hoy in the 1980s. In it, you can hear clips from the earlier televised climb in the 1960s. Joe Brown, a working class mancunian who took part in both climbs, can be heard veering from a strangulated RP in the older documentary to a more relaxed and natural mode of speech in the newer programme.
Unfortunately the Manchester accent has now become quite ugly.
"As long as we know what we're talking about, we could call the accent Kevin" had me on the floor
Kevinist propaganda
That might confuse me.
Kevin is not the most prominent Minion by accident. The star character in Home Alone is Kevin. Stereotypically, Kevin is prone to interpret the world in an idiosyncratic way, generally without malice, leading to consternation and delight by turns. Kevin is always well-loved. Great name for an accent.
Not many non-specialists called it "Received Pronunciation." It was commoner to speak of "The Queen's English" (earlier The King's English") but that created an ambiguity. Were they talking about how the Queen herself spoke? That was quite unlike most of her subjects, but no one dared to lampoon her before Lord Altrincham took the gloves off in 1957. That led to the Queen undergoing instruction to change the way she spoke.
Lionel were better!
Worth mentioning the interview with the Beatles on the eve of their appearance at the 1963 royal variety show. The interviewer is asking them about whether they'll modify their behaviour/appearance/speech given that they'll be appearing before the Queen Mother. He then mentions that Tory MP Ted Heath (who epitomised an 'affected' RP accent) had said that he "couldn't distinguish the Beatles' accents", and Lennon answers with a mock RP accent and the jibe that he "won't vote for Ted".
The look to camera as he says that chills the blood. So much more to be said about all of this.
@@DrGeoffLindsey yes, please! :-)
When I first heard that interview, I was convulsed with laughter. It was so refreshing to hear "The Establishment" being so ruthlessly and directly lampooned. It made me an instant fan of John Lennon.
I'd love to hear it again. I think the interviewer may have been Peter Woods.
Yes czcams.com/video/1tvdJYxqxWM/video.html then he does some Scot accent (i think).
@@DrGeoffLindsey I think what's chilling about the jibe, is that they are four boys kidding around and literally poking each other playfully, and then John becomes the informed adult, who knows what his political interests are. Exactly parallel to the misperception of lower-class accents indicating ignorance. Dare I say 'bit of Irish in 'im coming out. ☘
I’m an American and always loved hearing RP in old movies. As a child I liked movies with Ronald Colman and David Niven, who made English sound beautiful.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore. nowadays, almost all British try to sound uneducated and sound like they brought up in slums.
As an English person I find those accents nauseating. They are so redolent of everything that was wrong with colonial arrogance and, if I may coin a term, utter twattery.
My favourite for old RP is "Brief Encounter", the film of 1945 with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson which is iconic. Miss Johnson says "tirriblih, tirriblih" at one point but the whole film is like that. The woman serving in the station buffet has an attempt at a cockney-style, lower class accent.
And Americans like Katherine Hepburn and Gloria Swanson spoke with that Mid-Atlantic accent as well.
I have no real reason, but I always hated David Niven, that is, the character he always played. To me, it seemed unbelievably prissy and overdone. To me, that was RP at its most strained.
We have our own version of RP in Northern Ireland which I've heard called a "newsreader" or "UTV" (Ulster Television) accent which is essentially a particularly posh, almost anglophone version of a Belfast accent. The name comes from the fact that it is usually the kind of accent used by people on the news or TV in general over here that is considered very put on and inauthentic. A lot of celebrities from here go a bit newsreader to our ears when they get famous in Britain or America, probably done so in case their real way of speaking might be hard to understand to other English speakers.
do they say fylam instead of film?
As ESL, the bit about people not understanding their original accent reminds me of that interview with Pierce Brosnan when the interviewer reveals he comes from his hometown of Navan.
From that point my comprehension dropped by 40% as Brosnan reminisces about his time as a wee lad in 'avan, it is pretty clear he defaulted to his hometown accent since the host can keep up.
I'm pretty sure the 60s was when most people in Norway stopped putting on a "standard accent" (i.e. bokmål with a western Oslo accent, or Nynorsk with any big city accent) when speaking in more formal settings and started using their regular accent/dialect in all settings. Somewhat ironically in the 70s (or so) a lot of people in the labour movement who naturally spoke a western Oslo accent began putting on a fake eastern Oslo working class accent to avoid sounding too posh.
The 60s/70s is also (like in Sweden) the time we more or less completely stopped using the traditional polite address of using last names and titles and the second person plural "De" to refer to people politely to ising the second person singular "du" and first names.
By the 1990s we barely even remember to address the royals in polite forms when speaking to them in person. One journalist famously kept saying "du" (informal "you") rather than "deres kongelige høyhet" ("your royal highness") to the crown prince in a series of interviews filmed over several days because it's now so unnatural for us not to be informal with everyone. And when we speak about the royals we fairly regularly refer to them only by their first name without any titles; and the crown prince which properly is "kronprinsen" we very often refer to as the silly shortened form "krompen".
And we have an african shaman screwing the princess. Such progress.
I was told, when living there, that the "Frogner" accent was true Norwegian/Bokmål, but that was from my ex-husband who was a bit peculiar.
Well as long as you don't use Krumpas you will probably be ok.
@@edwardblair4096 Krumpus is the accent of trolls, of course.
Norway reminds me somewhat of Switzerland, where people stick to their regional accents, but due to lack of standardization of the various Allemanic dialects, Hochdeutsch is used in formal settings. Strangely enough, this doesn't apply to the French speaking part, where everyone pretty much sounds standard French. I think, it's great when people resist the homogenization of their speech, it keeps the linguistic diversity alive.
I'm a New England native having morning coffee and seeing what random videos are popping up on my feed. I had little interest in this topic yet you captured my full attention throughout.
Oh, if only more university professors here had your excellent communication skill! Thank you.
Lovely work on the closing credits too!
This is fascinating. So glad you posted this.
18:05 "...it became possible to sound too posh for your own good". The first thought that popped into my head was that twit (tamest word I could employ) Rees-Mogg.
Yes, he really went ape with his accent.
As an American, i find him easy on the ears.
@@smacwhinnie I didn't know who he was, found a video of a BBC interview. Interestingly the interviewer starts by asking isn't the American killing of Al Zawahiri "a huge scalp to get"? WTF? I guess the interviewer is getting ready to set him up later, by starting with some casual racism.
What a fascinating and well reasoned presentation. As a user of the English language (I'm a poet and playwright) who lived through this era I was aware of this shift but have never heard it analysed and explained so clearly. Thank you.
oh my god, i love that credits sequence. i can't wait for the follow-up to this video
What an excellent and fascinating video! Thank you dr Lindsey for continously sharing your expertise here on YT. Special kudos for the credits sequence. A video on why and how phonetic symbols became fossilised would be very interesting as well!
A friend of mine in Germany (whose teacher must've studied RP) approacher her teachier about translating the lyrics to the Beathles' "Yesterday". At which point he corrected her in that it was pronounced "YestaDEE".
As in "Yesterday, all my troubles were so far awee..."
Truly outstanding presentation. Seriously well done! You are a gifted communicator and educator.
I finally understand where Dr Frankenfurter's accent in Rocky Horror Picture Show comes from!!
Especially 'lab' and 'slab'
@@DrGeoffLindsey I saw a snippet of an interview with Tim Curry where he said he tried German and it just didn’t work and he ended up doing a “Belgravia Hostess with the Mostest” accent.
I always thought Tim Curry must have been Scottish because he rolled his R's so much, especially in "kicked to the ground"
@@xxPenjoxx If you listen closely to Sweet Transvesite, he has a crazy way of pronouncing "around" and "sound" that has to be this Advanced RP!
@@torchris1 I haven't got total recall of the song, but that MOUTH vowel was definitely an RP signature which I mention in various videos including my previous one. The most noticeable feature was the lack of rounding. People would sometimes write 'house' as 'hice' to depict a posh accent.
Reckon this is your best video so far mate, well done. The history section was very good and shows how all of these things are interconnected and you can't just look at a topic like this in a vacuum. Would love to hear more examples of phonetics as influenced by a wider cultural shift
Cracking delve into the joys of the British obsession with class, and its linguistic identifiers. Loved the historical and cultural elements to this vid, Geoff. It would be good to throw in a few more like this for other elements of language in the future, do'n cha know. Thank you.
Fascinating as always. The story of advanced RP reminds me in some ways of the Dublin 4 accent in Ireland, which became popular among young elites in the 1970s-80s, before quickly becoming so ridiculed to the point where it became largely neutered only 20 or 30 years later. Nonetheless, its legacy as the stereotypical 'posh' Dublin accent carries on to this day. Geoff, I would love to see a video on this topic, if it is something that interests you!
From Wikipedia:
"New Dublin English largely evolved out of an even more innovative variety, Dublin 4 English, which originated around the 1970s or 1980s from middle- or higher-class speakers in South Dublin before spreading outwards. Also known as "D4" or "DART speak" because of local associations, or, mockingly, "Dortspeak", this dialect rejected traditional, conservative, and working-class notions of Irishness, with its speakers instead regarding themselves as more trendy and sophisticated. However, particular aspects of the D4 accent became quickly noticed and ridiculed as sounding affected or elitist by the 1990s, causing its defining features to fall out of fashion by the 1990s."
The situation in Dublin seems extremely complicated - even more so than in London. I'd like to know more about the dialects there, but I think it would take a real expert on that specific topic to explain it.
@@lamudri Would Dortspeak have been ridiculed for being "West British," I wonder?
Traditional RP- The Goons
Advanced RP - Monty Python
Southern English - Shawn of the Dead
Dear Dr. Lindsey. I've just cime across this video and found it fascinating. As a language student of the late 1980s-early 1990s, the tremendous preoccupation with RP has always fascinated me, particularly as a fan of George Bernard Shaw and the plan to invent an acceptable and inoffensive accent for the BBC. I hope you realize that your video would have greatly upset some of the lesser but more popularized authorities on linguistics, phonetics ad, particularly, accents of my generation. The real experts would, of course, have recognized the inevitable futility of an imposed form of speech as a long-term project. Thanks for this. You've made my day!
As an American who lived in England when I was younger, I found it interesting that you could tell a lot more about someone's socioeconomic class in England from their speech than you could in the United States.
I think that I finally understand Richard E. Grant's accent fully. -- his teachers were in Africa while all of those social changes were occurring. I guess this applies to Freddie Mercury as well, but I'm more familiar with his singing voice than his speaking voice. Edit: as I re-read this comment I realize I haven't offered any context. I have seen several sources remarking that the people who speak the best, most perfect English (i.e., with the "right" accent) are those who were raised in Africa or India or other, now former colonies. Two famous examples are Grant, who was born in Swaziland, Freddie Mercury in Zanzibar. Very interesting and all that, but presumably because I am American, I wondered first if this was actually true and second why that would be the case. Still not sure if this is really a "tell," but your video definitely explains why this could occur. Thanks!
Fascinating video, as always
I still have a copy of the Oxford Dictionary (the abridged or the shorter?) my parents gave me when I left Malaysia to go to the US to study. I recognized the Gimson symbols; the dictionary used it to describe pronunciation. And I also distinctly remember being confused when I encountered the IPA years later, trying to correlate it with the Gimson symbols. It was not something I dwelt on but this video has finally cleared it up for me. Many thanks. I really enjoyed the video.
This is insightful, but I would say the demise of RP shouldn't be too overexaggerated. I grew up in a middle class family in North Yorkshire and went to a private 'prep' school in the late 70s to early 80s and we all spoke 'RP' more or less then (I remember one teacher there in particular, who had a very old-fashioned upper class, drawling kind of speech - he looked and sounded rather like Churchill). Apparently I started off with a slight Yorkshire accent from my state nursery school but my first teacher at the prep school soon told me the 'right' way to speak, with long 'ah' sounds in bath and path etc. I went to a state comprehensive after that where more people (but not everyone) had Yorkshire accents. But then I went to a (more academic, but still 'state') grammar school, where I remember an English teacher, helping me prepare for a debating competition, telling me my pronunciation of bury (with an 'uh' sound) was wrong and I should say it like 'berry' - so I probably lost my last more Yorkshire pronunciation then! An RP accent was definitely still associated with prestige and education then. My accent now is not as posh as when I was little, but it is still a quite neutral, 'dictionary' sort of pronunciation, and not regional. I live abroad now but most of my family and their friends in the UK still speak more or less 'RP', though toned down compared to the old BBC newsreaders. You won't often now hear the sort of accent where, for example, people would have said something like 'het' instead of 'hat' and 'room' would have the same sound as 'foot'. But maybe all accents are tending to move a bit closer -- fewer speak with a really 'broad' Yorkshire accent, and fewer speak with an extreme version of RP.
Haven't watched the video yet but I like the idea that "RP"stands for role-play.
I grew up in Kent and with a lower middle-class upbringing so I went to a state school. We were taught what I mistakenly called RP but was really General Southern English with correct grammar and no dialect. Same at university (Bristol, 1970s); people from all over with many, mostly middle-class 'softened' accents but correct grammar, no dialect. In the 1980s I lived and worked in Manchester for five years, again with mostly middle-class people from all over where the accents veered toward what I tend to call (don't know if that is the correct term) General Northern English with the short 'a' etc. That being the North-West so I don't know if the North-East middle-class (as opposed to working-class regional) English is much different. There are always the occasional people I've met with strong regional accents (and not necessarily living in the areas where their accent comes from) but I tended to find them in the minority in the circles I frequented. I've never really met anyone who actually speaks 'posh' RP English: only seen it satirized on Television all my life.
Reverse Polish was killed after the HP calculator.
Fringe
(not all of them will have had my maths teacher...)
It never died - I have an HP 15C on my mobile phone.
Didn't Texas Instruments do one ? Then there the language Forth.
Actually, maybe someone should do an RPN calc as an Android app.
@@quantisedspace7047 Playstore offered me RPN calculator apps via autocomplete after inputting "reverse po"...
What the hell are you talking about? 😂
Hi Geoff, I found this particularly priceless. RP being not that geographically geared is, I think, a direct product of the British class system. For a foreign learner like me, the video provides invaluable social context. Thank you.
Class systems have been in place everywhere in the world and it's natural they would be linked to language
I love this channel!!! Every video a gem!
I can't believe you missed out on the title "RIP RP"
Thanks for all the information though, that was fascinating!
I say, what a simply exquisite moving picture.
I have long been an ardent admirer of Cary Grant and would love to see how he ended up coming up with his iconic and unique accent - where all the parts of it came from and its construction. Hope this is something that would interest you. Thanks for your continually engaging content. Best wishes from the Pacific NW.
That’s brilliantly put! Thank you, this actually clarifies some matters for me, given I wasn’t around in 1960s and I’m not native.
BRAVO! Stunningly well done!
I had guessed the year would be 1963, so I was close. I grew up in a lower working class council estate in the 60's, a place built for Londoners displaced by the war where they spoke a kind of weird cockney accent, and I well recall the contempt we all had for rich posh gits who dressed like penguins and listened to chamber music (classical music) and we had hours of fun deriding them and their accent.
Yes, you can make a case that 1963 was 'the' year (not that it matters tbh), but e.g. the seeds of the Profumo scandal were planted in 1962.
Aren't they wonderful!
@@DrGeoffLindsey I would say that the scandals in the modern Royal Family must have shaken the U.K. to its core. I do note that a poll of Canadians support Prince Harry which doesn't seem to be the case in the U.K. I guess he was trying to tell his Royal Familly members to straighten up and fly right. It hasn't worked. They are content to march on like lemmings going over a cliff.
wow well done you!
And now both accents (RP and cockney) are dead or dying. Would be a lot cooler if they were both still around.
I remember a while ago, an American woman wanted to show how to pronounce a British accent. I think she heard a lot of the posh accent from British comedies, and some people said it was a very Monty Python accent (we got Monty Python in the USA for a very long time). She got lambasted
Poor woman. Then again, the Internet wasn't at the stage it is now
Yes, we now get far fewer Americans doing over-posh British and Brits doing 'American' as a cowboy.
@@DrGeoffLindsey There's a fun anecdote going around about a student of Japanese being told his diction is fine but his intonation comes from watching too many gangster films.
I appreciate the attention to detail in how you processed the Patreon members' names. Very nice reproduction of the artefacts of sixties TV.
A small correction: Harold Wilson was born and raised in Huddersfield. He was not a Merseysider. I agree completely with your analysis, however. And regarding the Queen - I shall never forget how startled I was to hear Her Majesty, whilst sitting for a portrait by Rolf Harris, offer as a response to a question not "no", but "nah", just as a Londoner would. I kid you not. I had to rewind my VCR several times in order to convince myself that I had heard her correctly. You can verify this yourself by looking up "The Queen by Rolf" on CZcams and going to 11:09.
It's like the William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal upper class accent that seems to live on only in the movies. There was Thurston Howell the Third on Guligan's Island and his wife, Lovey. I think when Gore Vidal and those guys died, the accent died with them. No one could talk like that with a straight face. The same phenomenon happened in the UK and probably donno lots of other countries.
I thought the same. There's a name for that accent - is it Mid Atlantic something or other? It was also widely taught.
George Plimpton also sounded almost English, his accent being a product of his family background.
Eleanor Roosevelt sounded more like the young late Queen than an American.
In the case of William F Buckley he actually learnt English as a child in England, so his accent was literally transatlantic.
We Muricans call that the New England accent, or we once did.
This video goes well with Simon Roper's Upper Class accents through time (Did the British Once Sound American?). Two fantastic academics on linguistics. Thanks Dr Lindsey!
Your "advanced RP" examples reminded me of Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio Play (first episode), when she arrived at Arthur's house to dedicate the "most splendid and worthwhile" bypass to be driven through his home. Her speech had the very air of "pompous self-importance" it's meant to convey. Fortunately, she soon thereafter vanished in a puff of hydrogen, ozone, and carbon monoxide.
Great video as always! Thank Dr. Lindsey (and please consider continuing the dictionary's edition; it would love seeing the great change of symbols, or the real ones😅)
Which dictionary?
@@DrGeoffLindsey the pronunciation dictionary that has been written by J. Wells.. now that he's not going to continue it, you could do a new version with the phonetic symbol system that you use. It could be a great opportunity to change/restore the symbols.
Fascinating set of comments to a fascinating video. Alongside the RP pronunciation there was also the "RP" grammar and sentence construction, for instance - " having agreed this, we can move on to..., based on continued struggle to reflect the meaning of Latin past participles, or the avoidance of prepositions at end of sentences, which is still the standard Dutch/Germanic way of constructing sentences. I also notice nowadays the common dropping of the "-ly" ending to convert adjectives into verbs ( whether that is a more recent change I don't know).
It's not standard, in fact it's an error, in German to put a preposition at the end of a sentence. Where a word that looks like a proposition appears there, it's not actually a preposition but a particle, the separated part of a separable verb. For example in "Ich steige auf mein Auto auf" = "I get in my car", "auf" appears twice, once as a preposition and again as a particle as part of the verb "aufsteigen". Dangling prepositions generally happen in English in relative clauses and questions, e.g. "Which car are you going to get in?" - in German, "Auf welches Auto stehst du auf?" - the preposition still goes before the noun. If you make the subject a pronoun, it merges with the preposition: "Which are you getting in?" - "Worauf stehst du auf?"
I first saw Albert Finney in the Dresser. Extraordinary voice; funny scene in it where he stops a train by filling the entire station with his voice. A few years later I read Alec Guinness's (auto?)biography. He said the army medical examiner (when he enlisted) told him his lung capacity was significantly greater than normal and if he had an explanation for it. Guinness told him "I'm a stage actor."
Stage actors in the days before everyone wearing a microphone were taught to "speak from the diaphragm". It was a technique of keeping the shoulders back and your neck straight to keep the kinks out of the vocal path, and being able to breathe very deeply. You could produce absolutely amazing quantities of sound near effortlessly, without straining, and without shouting. You could do it for hours at a time with no more effort than a normal conversation.
In the 80s I saw Uncle Vanya with Michael Gambon and Jonathan Pryce. Gambon could speak 'quietly' and fill the theatre, but all Pryce could do was shout. (Pryce has grown on a bit more since.)
@@DrGeoffLindsey @lwilton's comment reminded me of the compliment people gave to Ben Gazzara; and since you've brought up the same thing, here it is:
"...[from] his performance as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway... [people] talk about how ... when Gazzara whispered he could be heard from the back balcony."
You know, Dr Lindsey, that I'm a Costa Rican Spanish speaker. I try hard to understand your phonetic work, but it attracts me very much. Thank you.
Congratulations on a great and very informative video. I'm doing a PhD that partly deals with the phonetics and phonology of what used to be RP and now people recognise as Southern British English. I am using Gimson (1970) and Wells (1982) to compare them with more recent sources such as the latest edition of Gimson's Pronunciation of English by Alan Cruttenden which was published in 2014. There is a whole section in that last book dedicated to discuss what should be the name that replaces RP as the term to refer to the Southern British English and the author proposes General British and I was wondering what is your opinion on the matter.
Again, I found your video most interesting and I will probably cite it in my thesis!
This change in prestige is commented upon in the opening minutes of the first ever Doctor Who episode 'An Unearthly Child' originally broadcast on 23 November 1963.
(LIVELY MUSIC PLAYING ON RADIO)
Barbara:
Susan.
Susan:
Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Wright.
I didn't hear you coming in.
Aren't they fabulous?
Barbara:
Who?
Susan:
It's John Smith and the Common Men.
They've gone from 19 to 2.
Barbara:
Oh.
Ian:
John Smith is the stage name
of the honourable Aubrey Waites.
He started his career as Chris Waites
and the Carollers, didn't he, Susan?
Susan:
You are surprising, Mr Chesterton.
I wouldn't expect you to know things like that.
Ian:
I have an enquiring mind.
And a very sensitive ear.
I live in Cornwall having moved down from Coventry 15 years ago. The other day I was walking past the local secondary school as they broke up for the day and amongst hundreds of teenagers I heard nothing that I would have called 'Cornish' or even 'West Country' just 10 years ago!
If anything I'd describe the prevailing accent as southern middle class with a smattering of London council estate thrown in.
No judgement! Just observation!
yeah i've noticed i've never heard this accent in current media
Yes, I noticed in that interview of that woman who deflowered Prince Harry so many years ago that her accent was in no way comparable to the Newfoundland English from the Protestant outports and yet, that accent is said to be derived from the English of Cornwall. Something must hve changed in Cornwall English more recently and, of course, Newfoundland English is changing, too, because Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 and modern means of communication are everywhere today.
alright then I'll judge, these young people are terrible. Destroying our culture and heritage they are!
Thank you for your video... this is fascinating. It would love to see you analyze the speech patterns of historical recordings before the 1960s.
How does RP relate to the “posh” Trans Atlantic accent heard in many American movies from the 1940s and 1950s? Katherine Hepburn’s accent comes to mind. I hear a lot of the RP accent in Trans Atlantic.
The Transatlantic accent was based on 1920s RP with a few modifications from the East Coast of the US.
An Australian elocutionist, William Tilly (and later, Edith Skinner), propagated a “World English” accent, and the nascent sound movie market picked the accent as it was deemed easy to understand in every part of the English speaking world.
@@Leofwine In early American sound films, as portrayed in "Singin' In the Rain," stage actors were recruited to coach formerly-silent movie stars and that often resulted in a very strange standardized accent, notably pronouncing "you" as "yoh".
My mother was born in *Bolton* in 1929. Though one wouldn't have thought it, when hearing her speak..
She had her accent educated out of her by rout. And brought me in the same way, from 1965 (ie) "Mum, I'm going tut, shop." err!! "You mean you are going, to *the* shop."
But now it's ok to say *"Thas dunt talk propa, like what us does"* . ha ha ha
I don't think I ever heard my mother's Philadelphia accent, but she must have had one at some point.
Interesting that you said that the TRAP and DRESS vowels hadn't lowered in Australian English. They definitely have, for younger speakers anyway. They're not as low as in England, but still much lower than they used to be. I think this change must have happened later than it did in England.
I didn't associate the 60's with dresses becoming lower.
@@andrewg.carvill4596 they lowered once the new accent was used on them
I think anyone who refers to Australian as a single accent probably isn't an authority on Australian accents. I can locate seven different accents just in the eastern states. I don't have enough samples from further west to be up-to-date with them.
I liked the heritage ad. My dad filled 2 3 drawer filing cabinets with the family genealogy going back 73 generations. One family book on the Sterling line published in 1858 goes back 600 years. As to pronunciation and word usage Between US and UK I know a few UK terms and can usually guess context on others.
Very informative. Interesting and concise
I think a lot of English speaking countries had this issue, and it mostly manifested itself in newsreaders. Nobody in New Zealand, for example, talked like Philip Sherry or Judy Bailey in real life, but that halfway-round-Cape-Horn accent was what they gave us.
My dad was a radio man (DJ, presenter, commercial voiceovers etc.) during the '60s and '70s and used RP. Even in his everyday speech, he never had a strong Kiwi accent (though partly as a matter of conscious choice, I think). During the '80s RP (and his "trained", resonant vocal style) started falling out of favour.
People from outside of New Zealand and Australia did have problems understanding the NZ accent though. Those news readers may have adjusted their accents to communicate with people in the outside world. By the way, I grew up in NZ. I remember Phillip Sherry but not Judy Bailey. Are they from the same time?
@@davidlloyd7597 RP was very much an artifact of the general NZ attitude/assumption that New Zealand was a far-flung outpost of England, which lasted all the way through the 19th century into at least the 1960s. I was born in the late '60s and was very much aware of that as a kid. It only really started to shift (quite quickly, at the cultural scale) during the 1980s. Thus, early NZ radio and then TV presenters affected RP pronunciation simply because it was the "done thing" - it was expected, as professionals, that they would sound "English".
@@BartitsuSocietyyou probably don't remember standing up in movie theatres for God Save the Queen
@@davidlloyd7597 I do, actually, and I remember being aware when people stopped doing that.
Thanks! Interesting and good to know, as always.
I can totally understand that before there was one way to learn a foreign language without leaving your country - through a textbook written ages ago. But it astonishes me that now, when this information is available for anybody who has access to the internet, some teachers of English have no idea that RP isn't used as it was before, or never heard about SSB and apply the term RP to English used in London. I study English in uni and my pronunciation would always get 'corrected'. I couldn't understand what the problem was and thought I can't hear the sounds until I saw one of your videos. So, thank you so much!
Awesome video, somehow 25 minutes just flows right past and I'm surprised by the (excellent) credits at the end.
@DrGeoffLindsey This is fascinating, thank you! Now, as a German who was supposed to learn "Queen's English" in the around 1980, I would be very interested in a more dumbed down version on how to interpret IPA the British way as opposed to American which dominates the Internet.
I recall your great hints about ship/sheep for the French - so I'm suggesting to contrast British and American English with respect to significant pronounciation features - but then for English as a foreign language: Like German "that" sounding like "dot" in the US, because we struggle to find the "flat" vowel, and the non-posh British do understand German "that" better (but es bunk bulance, thut is). In Holland and France, they also learn "bütler" for butler where I would say butt-ler. We simply don't know how to read the IPA.
The problem could be that you would know too many dialects, so I refer only to average neutral News broadcasting in UK vs. US, and all in connection with the IPA symbols that might or might not differ for UK/US.
Or else, take some time to advertise more of your older videos, I just may have overlooked the one I'm suggesting here.
Living and studying in Bavaria I was struck by how Germans would pronounce English loan words containing /æ/ with a much closer vowel, to the point that it sounded to me (native English speaker with a generic southern accent) more like /ɛ/. It was quite hard to understand them until I realised what they were doing. It would have been clearer to me if they'd opened it to their native /a/ instead.
@@cshairydude exactly, we would say "flat/care" with closed/open "eh" influenced by the US (?) but "that" still like butt (dot?) - and now I remember vaguely one session in a so-called language lab (lepp? lahp?) in about 1978 where they tried to get us closer to the open ah, but probably without success - and I'm still confused about the "fat butler"...
@@franks.6547 The use of the letter /ʌ/ for "butt" is an especially egregious anachronism and probably misleading for 2nd language learners. It's usually more like German's /ɐ/ (the sound of -er when the r isn't articulated).
Why not just imitate British commentators and American and Canadian commentators when you speak. If you listen to Democracy Now enough, and try to imitate that speech pattern and then, listen to the British commenators on Israel and imitate their speech patterns, you should succeed very well. Adopt whichever one you feel most comfortable with.
@@dinkster1729 Thanks, I see what you are doing there :-) But my inquiry was more about the IPA symbols, and how they are to be interpreted in US or UK context. For they can't be used consistently on a global level with respect to pure phonetics, when they seem to reflect "regional" (UK/US) standards of bygone eras without being updated in the dictionaries every 30 years or so.
When I was younger, I traveled to the UK often for work (I'm a New Englander). This was about 30 years ago. RP was very much in evidence in London, where I stayed. I can see now how it has changed. Fascinating stuff. Thanks Dr. Lindsey.
this is one of your most interesting videos yet
A very interesting linguistic examination of RP's role in the 1960's and beyond. Thank you, and I enjoyed it. But I think it would be much more informative (especially to your non-British audience) to include samples of the types of speech you are referencing. That would really make this lesson more compelling for today's speakers of English, I think. (p.s. I do understand about copyright and such.... probably very difficult to include examples of speech as a result).
6:43
To be fair, in the first couple of movies Connery was trying to inflect something akin to RP, or at least closer to it, but then they gave up. And Terrence Young had to beat that working class Scott out of Connery by taking him to luxury restaurants, casinos, etc.
Connery later tried an American accent in his first scene in "The Untouchables," but he dropped it for the rest of the movie.
And a few years later, played a Russian sub commander with basically a Scottish accent. 😆
Of course you're right, in fact I talk about this in my vocal fry video. But Saltzman and Broccoli knew exactly what they were doing in not casting an RP type as expected. It's no accident we also had Australian, Irish and Welsh Bonds, nor that the closest thing to an RP Bond, Moore, was the joke one with the union jack parachute.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Oh, so that’s where I got this information from, silly me. I still recall they casted Connery because he was cheap at the time, and yet fitted the role, though. Sir Roger is my favorite Bond. I am not a native speaker, and I’d thought he’d had an RP, but not too posh, a “simplified” RP, if you will, but just weeks ago I read that he’d had Mid-Atlantic accent, perhaps with a British twist. I was deeply ashamed.
@@edwardphilibin3151 Wasn't he supposed to be a Latvian serving in the Soviet navy? Calling a Latvian 'Russian' will get you in a LOT of trouble.
Another great and informative episode.
Good survey. Delighted to sign up. I remember in about 1991 telling my then fiancée, who had a book with RP English pronunciation indicated, that very few people actually spoke like that. I also remember my mother in the 1960s insisting that the short endings of "happy" etc were "correct". She changed her own speech considerably in the last forty years of her life. But I'm not intending to change my own speech to conform with current trends by abandoning the word "an" and the glide in "the army".
Very interesting and enlightening, thank you!
Another video on local readings of English words. Eventually, it appears right to remember them as Latin writing with some changes and remember some their local reading or dialect readings like in Chinese. I like how some Italians misspell English words in Latin manner, it is so much more understandable for foreigners than normal English.
"it appears right to remember them as Latin writing with some change": But English is not a Romance language. "Latin words with some changes" are still not English words. It's only when they become a living part of the English language and participate in other English changes -- and some get so widely used that educated native speakers don't even recognize them as borrowed from Latin and can't believe they are -- that's when they contribute to English..
I've read that L2 English speakers often find it easier to communicate with other L2 English speakers from different language backgrounds than with native English speakers. Now that non-native speakers are the majority, along with native speakers from non-English majority countries, that's becoming a bigger phenomenon. So there may be a growing dichotomy between English-majority countries and non-English majority countries, and those non-majority countries are developing their own indigenized forms of English (India English, Serbia English, Russia English, China English, etc). There's probably nothing speakers in English-majority countries can do about that, and of course they don't want their own language to change in a way that hinders its usefulness at home. So they'll increasingly diverge, but still remain mutually intelligible, at least nation to nation even if not every individual speaker. And their written English grammar and spelling will probably remain 98% in sync with the English-majority standards, because they have so far. Again, not every speaker, but their national standards and professional books.
@@sluggo206It is generally easier to remember foreign language sounds as distinct and consistent ones, without n rules and even more exceptions. Latin, unlike English, is way more consistent and is easy to remember if your are outside the English-speaking environment. It is easier to recall and translate then into local dialects - for me, as I'm outside the English-speaking environment, English pronunciation or its variations fall into the category of "dialects", that is, for one word, remembered as its Latin approximation, there can be multiple dialect readings, which I recall when actually speaking to native English speakers, otherwise, I vocalize them to myself as heavily distorted Latin-like words (example: word as [v - o - r - d]), which have consistent and non-varying pronunciation (i.e. pronounced in the way they are written). It would take some extra effort to remember them as proper English outside English environment.
Finally, a phonetic explanation of Gap Yah
Yes, that 'gup' is the continuation of the decompression I mention in the video, so it actually reaches (or passes) the quality Jilly Cooper was talking about.
@@DrGeoffLindseyPrivate Eye used to call her ‘Jolly Super’
Great lecture, well argued. Thanks!
Great video! I would love another video on the phonetic symbols in the current situation. What's your attitude towards the system that is used by Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation? I can see the reasons behind it, however it does produce a lot of confusion, especially when used for learners of English as a foreign language.
I think it's his most popular video
maybe strange, but I have a respect for the author of that book on pronunciation - just several years to notice that he was not right and say it? Normally people cannot realize things like that for their whole life, to say nothing about acknowleding mistakes publicly.
Superb video Geoff, I very much enjoyed it. I think class and region have very interesting intersecting dynamics. When I was at school in the 60s and 70s in Edinburgh, and later, Cupar, Fife, I would speak with my peers at school more towards the local accent, and posher at home, because my parents had "escaped" the glottal stop of their 1920s poor working class roots. Their accent wasn't RP, but it was "smoothed" out. On the grammar front, I wasn't allowed to say "me and James", rather, it had to be "James and I".
When I taught at Edinburgh in the 90s, a friend of a friend was an authentic RP-speaking Scot, but they must be a dwindling breed.
The closest I've heard to RP spoken by a Scot was more Miss Jean Brodie than Jacob Rees-Mogg. The best example I can think of are the Eton forged vowels of Tam Dalyell - I just checked out a YT video where Kirsty Wark (now there's an accent) is interviewing him in 2014. Checking his biography, I discover he was Nicolas Ridley's fag at Eton (shudders).
I was trying to think of such an example, and struggling a bit, until I thought of Tam Dalyell, who went to Eton in the 40s, and can be seen speaking with Kirsty Wark (now there's an accent) in a 2014 interview that's on YT. Even then, some Scottishness shines through to my ears. Otherwise, anything I've ever heard from Scots, that even approaches RP, has been closer to Miss Jean Brodie than Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Stephen Fry does a very good imitation of a posh Scotsman claiming not to have a trace of a Scottish accent!
@@philroberts7238 I just watched that magnificent QI Fry Scottish Accents clip. I've definitely heard all the accents he mimics so accurately. Easy to picture the posh bloke's tattersall shirt and red corduroy trousers.
Love your work Dr. Lindsey, even if you don't quite get the full spectrum of Australian English. I'd like to hear more analysis of the post-RP posh accent, which I understand to be a kind of hybrid cockney/grammar-school RP, like Kiera Knightley.
You can hear the difference even between different generations of the royal family. Charles is, I think, "advanced RP", whereas William and especially Harry are much closer to Estuary.
Fascinating video, thanks :)
I've never heard you talk about "Estuary English" at all. Is Estuary English literally what is spoken on the Thames estuary (i.e. Essex)? Or is it the standard, Southern accent used in British film and television, somewhere between Cockney and RP (i.e. equivalent to SSB)? I've heard it described as both, but those two are totally different accents to me, so I'm a bit confused.
I would be very interested in a video about modern development in English. You touched on it briefly here, but I'm curious about how phonetics is changing now. How has SSB been influenced by cockney, "estuary english", MLE and/or GenAm? For that matter do people actually still speak cockney or has that died out like RP?
Seconded. As a non-local, it's hard to get an understanding of what distinct dialects are and have recently been spoken in London and the South East, and what they should be called.
Thirded. I’ve never understood it, either. (Then, again, I’m in the US so maybe that isn’t surprising.)
The other thing I’ve never gotten was what US people would have perceived in the 1960s, rightly or wrongly, as the “standard British accent”-e.g., how Diana Rigg (who was from Yorkshire but spent her childhood in India) spoke as Emma Peel in _The Avengers_ or how Julie Andrews spoke, well, anywhere or maybe how David Attenborough speaks-and how that relates to RP. They were obviously not speaking with a working class accent but they weren’t doing classic RP, with the distinctive vowels in _dress, face_ and _happy,_ either (and, obviously, they weren’t doing what would later become SSB). So what exactly _were_ they doing? Was it just a some “standard” upper middle class accent (not overly posh but not working class) or something?
_Adding:_ Listening to Jack Whitehall and his dad, maybe that might be the same thing? So it’s a “posh” accent as opposed to an RP accent?
In the south-east of England, think of a (largely class-based rather than geographical) continuum from cockney to RP, then 'estuary English' is between the two, but definitely closer to cockney than the old-fashioned RP that hardly anyone speaks nowadays. As for whether cockney has died out, the answer is no, but it will do: that 'traditional' London accent is mostly spoken by the over-40s nowadays. There's a noticeably different London accent that younger people have.
@@gattocattivo99 There never was one "London" accent anyway, if you look at some old films you can clearly see the difference between Shepherd's Bush, Bermondsey and Hackney. Listen to Tim Roth (Bermondsey) and Dennis Waterman in Minder (West London). As for Cockney it's decades since I heard it live.
I was a child of 11 when the Profumo scandal hit. Looking at the UK now who would have believed he would be so prophetic.
Fascinating video!
@DrGeoffLindsey enjoy your videos even though I'm an American. I'm always fascinated by sudden cultural or linguistic change!
While I was watching this I wondered what the American version of RP must be. Once I suppose it would have been the "Mid-Atlantic" accent. But today it would have to be the "midwestern" accent, that flat accent that has become the "standard" accent for many people on this side of the Atlantic. But it occurs to me that the rise of the midwestern accent is rather strange. As far as I know, nobody is consciously promoting the midwestern accent. It doesn't really have any sort of prestige associated with it. It's not the language of an elite upper class. It's not even the primary accent of our largest cities; the New York and Chicago accents remain distinctly regional. In many ways it is just the flattest, most boring accent, one not associated with any particular region or group of people; yet somehow it seems like most Americans now speak it by default. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this, or if you would recommend any interesting (to a layman) linguistic work on the subject.
Albert Finney is a superb actor who did whatever accent was necessary for the character. More interesting to me is Michael Caine who seems to have stayed loyal to his original speech patterns--and Alfie was another huge English movie of the 1960s.
In a broadly cultural sense, you certainly have a point. However, there have been quite a few widely respected and admired communicators who have carried on the tradition of pronunciation and prosody one associates with RP. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry come to mind.
It's the exceptions that prove the rule- the fact that you notice their different way of speaking proves his point. No one expects a 100% cut-off when change happens.
@@scattygirl1 Hmmm. Well, I'm not so sure that the two public figures I named are simply outliers--relics of a fading past. I would say rather that they are exemplary and notable precisely because their use of language represents and demonstrates those wonderful characteristics that are associated with RP. It is doubtful that they would have made such a mark on our times if their speech did not align with the very best traditions in education and culture. There is an exactness, a clarity, a wonderful sense of rhythm and cadence that distinguishes them. These qualities are fostered in the institutions and traditions that continue to carry the banner. Huge swaths of academia, theatre, film, government speak RP or Modern RP. Aspiring actors still develop correct speech in acting conservatories. One hears RP in airports around the world. Lol! There are also younger exponents of RP on CZcams who are teaching this pronunciation to non-native speakers. Very true--I only named two individuals, but on reflection I can hardly say that they're exactly oddities. There are great numbers of others. Probably 1% of British people speak with the RP accent. That's been true for a long time and I haven't heard much of a change in that. Certainly, the gritty realism of the late 1950s brought a broader palette to the viewing audience. And it is certainly provocative to announce "the year that killed RP". And perhaps there is some intended hyperbole in that. But he does make some good points, as always.
Thanks for an interesting video, Dr Lindsey. :)
About ten years ago I noticed that many non-native-English-speakers were interested in learning Estuary English. Do you think this will be the reference dialect/accent of the future?
I probably should watch your other videos before even bringing this up, but there was also the "Great Vowel Shift". You've likely already talked about that. I find it very interesting, especially in a time when, once again, there is a melding of people from various places in the world and (at least in the U.S.) there is a great divide in social classes happening again, bringing changes in music, trends in TV and movies, and even a shift in clothing. I had barely noticed the change in fashion until my daughter pointed it out to me, but it's definitely there. Do you think there's a correlation each time, with these things seeming to occur together?
I'm from Sweden and studied English in school for 10 years. I always thought that RP was in principle how Jeremy Brett sounded when he played Sherlock Holmes, but that isn't the case, then?
I'd say that Mr Brett spoke almost "unmarked" RP, but he also had a *very* crisp enunciation, (in keeping with his portrayal of the character) in the Holmes TV productions, which also uses archaic vocabulary in places, but as the video indicates, the RP labels are less reliable or certain than they once were.
For example, I (a lay person) previously understood there were only *two* RPs, marked and unmarked, where the "marked" form possibly maps to what this video calls "Conservative RP", and/or possibly to "Advanced RP" (maybe both?).
But, thinking about it, it makes sense to distinguish Kenneth More (appearing in this video twice, honking the horn of his car) from (say) Noël Coward, with the latter having far more distinct 'upper class' vowels (or "vials" as Coward himself might pronounce it). "Toast" is pronounced as "taste" and so on.
By my previous working definitions, the unmarked form of RP is the speech of (e.g.) Richard Dawkins or Stephen Fry, or (to take an example from Dr. No) Bernard Lee, who portrayed 'M' in most of the Bond movies. Fry's vowels are occasionally more marked.
Desmond Llewelyn (who portrayed 'Q' in the Bond franchise) has a surprisingly strong marked RP accent in From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, but shifted gradually to a more unmarked form as the series progressed.
Not sure if the terms marked/unmarked are more "up to date". Seems like things have changed quite a bit.
Not really. Brett's accent as Holmes is SSB (Southern Standard British), what used to be called the "Oxford Voice". For formal RP in Sherlock Holmes, listen to Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone movies (not Rathbone himself, that's a Mid-Atlantic accent) - for Brett speaking formal RP, listen to him in "My Fair Lady".
RP is closely correlated to the period of the late British Empire and has a lot of historical baggage around the world because of that. As an Australia it always baffles me that ESL learners admire RP so much.
As an American. RP just sounds better bro.
Ebsoliutely fescinating - thenk you sew march. Subscribed!