Post
by drmoss_ca » Thu Aug 15, 2019 4:03 am
It's a complicated story. Ever since 1066 the ruling classes have spoken differently to the masses. Whilst Norman French (itself a mix of Frankish and Norse from Viking invaders) and Saxon have blended, along with the Norse influence of our own, the tradition of 'speaking proper' has been continued in a class-conscious society. There was always a tendency for people to want to lose their regional accent (think of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady) if they wanted to get on and rise in society, though, notably, wealthy northerners proudly refused to adopt southern speech, and consequently were always kept at arm's length.
This was codified when 2LO started broadcasting, and when it morphed into the BBC it was taken for granted that announcers must represent the way things ought to be done. Not only did this mean speaking with a Home Counties accent - the Home Counties being those around London; Bucks, Herts, Middx, Surrey, but not really Essex or Kent - but was extended to wearing a dinner jacket and black tie when on air. This provided a national example of how one ought to speak and sound, rightly or wrongly, if you were to be perceived as belonging to the establishment. This was known as Received Pronunciation, or RP. If you have heard clips of the Queen speaking when young, you will have heard an even more rarefied version of this, though she has thought it best to tone it down in later life. In the late 1990's, the BBC policy was abandoned, and regional accents encouraged. By dint of numbers, plus the situation of the Beeb in London, this has come to mean a predominance of London (very few Londoners are Cockney, and none speak like Dick vanDyke), and Essex accents. The outflow of Blitz-unhoused people from the East End into the purpose-built new towns of Essex has changed the Essex accent into a hybrid with Cockney. There were new towns built in Surrey, Hertfordshire, and even out to Wiltshire, where Swindon was tripled in size with post-war housing for the London overflow. So the BBC started to employ people who mostly sound alike, with the loose-mouthed careless speech of east London, now generally known as Estuary English. The influence this has had is stunning to someone like me, who left the UK in 1985 and has been back only occasionally. Like the frog in the boiling water, the English haven't noticed (just as they are surprised to hear that the roads are busier than they used to be), but it is a shock to hear everyone speaking as if trying out for a role in East Enders. If the BBC announcers tork loike it, 's'OK wif me, mate.
Now let me be clear about one thing. I don't mourn the passing of RP as a ticket to social climbing. I love regional accents, and was born in a place that gave me a childhood accent that my northern parents and brother laughed at. I sounded like a yokel from Far From The Madding Crowd, and still can. I decry the loss of regional accents that are being wiped out by the dominance of Estuary English. A couple of weeks ago I was able to compare a sixty year old Sussex man with a couple of youngsters. You'd never guess they came from the same place. It's the coming uniformity I don't like. Ideally, we would have a variety of local accents, dialects and vocabularies, with RP as a lingua franca, to let the Cornishman speak with the Geordie. But there again, we can't live in the past as much as we would like it. Sic transit, as they say on the underground.
"Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse."
Pierre-Simon de Laplace