Its worth noting that the key strength of RP isn't the number of people who speak it, it's the number of people who understand it, which is absolutely everybody who can understand english. If you intend to learn english you would pretty much always choose to learn RP.
Exactly! That's why I believe that there should be an International Standard English. I can say that American Standard is unaccented and that RP is very mildly accented. Many would disagree. A mildly bent vowel isn't much of a concern but if it's bent to the point of matching a different vowel, you get one word sounding the same as another. If I was to drop into Scotland, I'd probably understand less than half of what they say but they would have no trouble understanding me. Either American Standard or RP is a good baseline to start from. Anyone leaning English as a 2nd language should learn either one of those two and I think it would be advisable to spend a few years fussing over how to unite them into one International Standard. I've been promoting a phonemic alphabet consisting of 34 characters. A fully phonemic English alphabet where you spell what you say would result in people spelling words according to their local dialect, which means that accents would not just be heard by the ears, but they would, albeit to a lesser extent, also be seen in the language of the eye - namely the written word. This would make having an International Standard for spelling and pronunciation much more important.
@@7MPhonemicEnglish I've been living in the UK ten yeas and I still can't understand half of what people say around here. Almost everyone understands me save one or two people who mistook "back" for "bag."
@@impishrebel5969 hmmm. Do you think that it's mainly accent or is it lack of proper enunciation? I know that where I live, I have to deal with thick Spanish accent which is bad enough but then on top of that there's often the toothless, low-income, low I.Q. bumpkin who just plain never learned to speak English, so I catch about 20% of their words or just enough to discern that English is the language they're targeting.
eeh, in the US, often people would make me repeat when i didn't speak with an american pronounciation. Asking for a glass of water in restaurants was often a mystery, until i asked again for a glass of "wodder".. Seems lots of americans aren't used to hearing anything else than american english ^^ The grammar of RP is certainly universal, but the phonems, certainly not. Still, it's the most widely understood one.
@@uzbekuncle "that guy from Zanzibar" and "Hindustan" makes me feel such... interesting feelings. India, friend, is the generally accepted appellation right now.
I'm not sure about that one, MrVovansim. I had a subject at the Faculty called Phonetics of the English and at some point we talked about the synonyms for RP. Among many synonyms, such as BBC English, there was the "King's English". The professor talked about it and said that today it is rather referred to as "Queen's English" since the Queen herself is the reigning monarch, after King George ascended the throne in 1936. So my assumption, although I don't know as much about it, is that before referring to RP as "Queen's English" it used to be "King's English" before the accession of Her Majesty to the throne. Sure, Freddie had a pure RP accent and that may be the truth, but there was also the "King's English" earlier, before Her Majesty, which doesn't really make sense if we're talking about the band. If you see what I mean :) I may be wrong, and correct me if I am, I'm just trying to learn more about RP since I think I'll do my PhD thesis on it.
Wow this is interesting. I moved to the southern US from Taiwan as a very young child; I was already speaking Mandarin fluently, but didn't have a regional accent. I continued to speak it at home and was soon sent to Chinese school on weekends to learn reading and writing. I didn't regularly go back to visit family in Asia until about 10 years later, and though I'm still fluent, was surprised and slightly disappointed that almost every local I spoke to would ask me if I was from/visiting from America - this happened even more frequently/earlier in conversations in China. One Taiwanese shop owner finally told me she guessed I was visiting from/raised in America because my Mandarin was "too perfect"; she said she couldn't guess where I was from and my pronunciation was "textbook". Pretty cool to find out there are parallels across languages... 🤔
When I moved to San Francisco in 70s I remembered being surprised to find out my Chinese American co worker was studying Mandarin. She explained she had known only Cantonese from her relatives.
I have a friend from London. She’s grown up there but originally from Russia. She’s young but sounds like a ghost. Some of her words could be found in old books but no one in Russia speaks that way anymore
You know why? Because you pronounced every single word too clearly......! Few native speakers did like that. They could judge you in the very first time.
Not that you might know, however I wonder if South Koreans speak with a twang in their speech like American Southerners do in relation to North Korean speakers.
I was completely blown out when I first visited England for the first time as an adult able to talk English (learnt in Australia, and made myself a lot of international friends over the years) : I couldn’t understand ANYONE nor ANYTHING, my brain just DIDN’T REGISTER the language people talked as being English, and got itself convinced that I was actually hearing German (like when you write something in Google Translate and it fails to autodetect the source language). I needed a few full days to adapt, it was a crazy experience.
I'm an American English speaker and I have to enable CC when watching British TV shows lol.. None of those shows now use RP and I just have a hard time understanding cockney which a lot of their shows feature now.
@@jkid4855 I think growing up with the Redwall books and hearing a large range of accents in shows means I can usually still understand a lot of accents… but if you dropped me in the English countryside I would be struggling.
While teaching college-level English and "moonlighting" as a lowly dishwasher and cook's assistant in a San Francisco Bay Area restaurant run by a German, a Swiss, and a Dane, I was struck (hearing them converse with their various friends in their own native languages) by just how much the sounds and cadences of their own languages sounded like English.
heheh was chatting with a friend about some videogame dialogue bits that were a bit painful for their slightly off grammar and word usage, and that particular line popped in my head when I realised the developer was Hungarian when I thought they were British.
One of my first jobs in London (2000), as a foreign student, was in a beauty salon and one of the beauticians said I had a huge advantage because my accent was foreign and people would forgive mispronunciations, while hers was cockney and that was classified lower than mine and would never be forgiven of any mistakes.
Being a foreigner who learned English in England, and being myself a language teacher, I always look to the mouth of a native speaker to understand how he or she “builds” the phonemes. It’s rather interesting to watch your videos and learn more! How kind of you to make these videos. Thank you ever so much.
This video has enlightened me on why my african born professor (grew up going to a british school somewhere) has a more british sounding voice than my properly british prof
More British-sounding to you, Alexander, but not to me as an English person. It is true that so-called 'perfect' English is spoken by very few in the UK - as familiarity with the language from birth allows us not only to have accents and dialects, but to use the language as we have all learnt and can understand as a tool of communication. As a learner of foreign languages, I can never hope to have the command of any other language than I have of my own. My own is therefore maleable to me in a way that no other language is.
@ThisIsMyRealName I'm not quite sure what you're challenging. If you are truly bilingual, I don't see why you shouldn't have an equal command over both languages, though I would say that might depend on where you spent most of your time, or the exposure and type of exposure you have had to each langauge. I can hear accents from all over the UK and place them (mostly, anyway). I cannot do that with North American English (though I am learning because I am interested and study what I hear). I hear an 'American accent', or an Australian accent', which are quite different, but I've only recently learnt to distinguish, for instance, Autralian and New Zealand. I have spent long years with the French language and can hear differences between French and Canadian French, for instance, and even between Northern and Southern France, but nowhere near the finer nuances that I hear in my own language. I'm also not sure what 'more fluent pronunciation' is. To me, fluency and pronunciation are separate. Fluency is the ability to communicate easily and without hesitation. Whilst reasonable pronunciation is necessary to be understood, one can have excellent pronunciation but lack fluency, or have a good level of fluency with many errors in pronunciation. Clearly if you have exposure to more than one language from an early age, you are likely to have a good level in both. Also, 'perfect' language, I believe, only exists in the minds of teachers, and in their prize students. Native speakers use language in their own way, and the word 'perfect' just doesn't come into it!"
"if you sound too british, nobody would believe you are british'' yes quite true indeed. When I got to study in the UK in the 90s, I was so excited to put on my accent I learnt from good reliable old British tv shows, only to be told I was sounding more British than they were, and this was in Wales....where they have this sing-song rhythm to the language... (which I didn't know at that time) 😃
Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents are very different from RP or cockney, which is what people usually seem to associate with a ‘british’ accent! You likely sounded very ‘English’, rather than ‘British’, to them :)
There’s no such thing as a “British” accent, there’s Scottish, Welsh, English and Northern Irish and within those massive regional and class variations so saying “I have a British accent” is totally meaningless, just as a Scot doesn’t consider himself English, the collective “British” is only meaningful for international sport, politics and war 😀
Interestingly, my mum has an rp accent for the opposite reason - she grew up with a strong Nottingham accent, but when she was teaching English as a foreign language in Germany the kids couldn't understand her, so she changed her accent to rp
I used to work as a tour guide in the Canaries before lockdown (I am from Sweden). After one tour, an elderly lady wanted to correct a word she said I had mispronounced. Her friend protested and said that I had been right. They got this discussion going, and ended with the conclusion that no-one are so unsure about correct English pronunciation as the English themselves.
Having lived in Sweden in the early 80s, I went to Kursverkshamnet (from memory) in Vaxjo (without umlauts), to learn Swedish. Swedes from Stockholm could not understand people from Blekinge (where I worked), or even Goteborg, and would converse in, Standard English. Even in those days, a teenage Swedish school pupil (not "student") spoke better English than most british people. Ho-hum ... Slante.
Accents are an unbelievably fascinating thing. I’m from Ireland and despite having only 5 million people, we have thousands of distinct accents. Posh north Dublin, Lower class Dublin, Posh south Dublin, Kerry, Midlands, Cork, the list goes on and on and on changing wildly across the country. It really is very interesting.
i think the only place that takes it further than the british isles is china, where things have diverged to the point that the country is home to hundreds of, not accents, but regional LANGUAGES that all have various levels of inter-intelligibility between each other despite having identical grammar and nearly perfectly symmetrical written vocabulary. they can all write back and forth between each other despite not being able to hold a conversation, as long as they both know either simplified or traditional hanzi. AND EACH OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF LANGUAGES HAS ITS OWN ACCENTS. its absurd. i love it.
@@XcaptainXobliviousXye its totally mint, although i think british isles still has china beat for amount of accents and dialects to land mass and population haha
There's actually a very good reason for it. People used to either be educated at home or at a public school that you would pay for. Those public schools are now regarded as private schools due to the fees meaning the school isn't available to everyone
It defines the English mentality very well. For the rest of the world public refers to who can attend... In England it refers to who pays for it.......
Public schools are called state schools. There is also the presumption that private means elite, while American schools have increasingly turned to privately operate schools, that are accessible to the most needy.
Honestly, the whole accent dynamics in English is so excrutiatingly complex and delicate. I mean, I still can not believe that in England, middle class and upper class have different accents even if they are from the same region! When I hear English speakers talking about accents, I feel the same thing that I felt when I read about Ngoko-Krama distinction in Javanese. You know how accent-oriented English is, learning English more and more made me have a developed ear for my own native language that is Korean! I am now able to notice the subtle differences in people's accent in Korean. And I think that is at least partly due to the fact that I have been learning a language that fixates on accents variation extensively.
Hi, I'm Indonesian and also Javanese. Are you Korean learning Javanese? Wow, that's very...not usual 😀. And about Ngoko-Kromo in Javanese, it's actually a different way to speak, literally with different words with the same meaning, to an older or more respected person than you are. So I think it's not an accent. An accent in Bahasa Indonesia would be to listen to the difference pronounciation between many ethnics Indonesia has, such as by Javanese, compared to Batak or Sundanese, or even Papua from East Indonesia. Anyway, thank you for learning my language 🙏🏻😊.
Some people are much more tuned in to accent variations. I have noticed this directly. I am an American immigrant to Canada: some pick up on my accent while others do not. I live in Alberta and while visiting British Columbia, I have had locals comment that I don’t sound Albertan. In fact they thought I was from BC. I think my accent an American west coast accent. My pronunciation is sometimes corrected by people where I live. When I analyze the word in question, it is usually a word with more than one pronunciation suggestion, or an exception to a spelling rule in regards to pronunciation.
@@fronts3165 I'm from Alberta, but have spent half my life in Europe. Every time I go home, they ask me if I'm from Scotland or Ireland, bc they say my accent isn't Albertan with a side of Saskatoonian lol (I went to university there). I've only ever had 1 person who could tell exactly where I was from and only bc he'd spent time there and knew the accent. He even got that I'd lived in Saskatoon! (that was the freaky part lol)
I used to live in East Sussex and I had developed a beautiful British accent, you couldn't tell I was not from there. Now after 8 years back in Switzerland, having nobody to practice my spoken English with and because I'm influenced by movies and TV series I can hear my French accent creep up a bit and I've been asked if I were Australian 😂 I really miss speaking English everyday.
As an American born and raised in America, I am fascinated and grateful for your channel. I am learning so many things about the language I love and respect so much, learning about the school system in Britain, and so much more. I taught English/Language Arts in elementary school (grades K - 6) here in Florida for 33 years and found the ability of students to pronounce letter sounds correctly had a big impact on reading acquisition.
I'd like to add one more feature that characterises Posh English. Posh speech is very enunciated. Surely, you've got plenty of time for proper pronunciation when you belong to the upper class while those oiks serve to and work for you. Thus, you may allow yourself to avoid assimilation in /j + d, t, s, z/ clusters. For instance, the word 'tube' can be pronounced the way it is supposed to be pronounced according to its transcription - /tju:b/ instead of rather more common /tʃuːb/. Funny thing, when I started to learn English I had an old Soviet dictionary with that old-fashion transcription. Just like Gideon mentioned, the sound corresponding to the final letter -y (as in 'happy') was /ɪ/ and not /i/ (in Gideon's example there's /ə/, which is rather similar). The same goes for the suffixes -less, -ness, -ed, although they are still (especially -ed) pronounced with /ɪ/ (and not /ə/ or even /e/) in BE. Only after graduating from high school did I find out that there are a lot of other accents (not simply BE and AE). What did I do to shift from that unnatural posh version of my manner of articulation? Made a research and switched to contemporary RP / Estuary English. Which was just a lax type of Posh English to me. Nonetheless, I still preserve some 'old-fashioned' features in my English like that /-ʊə/ in tour, sure etc. Just because I like the sound of it and that pronunciation seems to me more 'adequate' in 'letter-sound' relation. Probably because I'm Russian and that's crucial for me.
@@LetThemTalkTV , my pleasure! The thing is, I'm overly focused on phonetics in general. In regard to English, I know that many people (you amongst them) say - 'Don't you bother about sounding foreign. Don't worry about your accent. As long as you're understood, everything's alright!' Except it isn't 😥 Let me elaborate. It's quite natural for people to judge others by their looks. In our case, we are judged by the accent. And the last thing I personally would like to hear is - 'Mate, you're from (country of origin), right?' Because it shows me that I haven't studied well enough. And again, in my country we don't have regional accents in a way you have them in the English speaking world. (Strictly speaking we do, but those are simply slight variations of the 'standard' speech.) Thus, if one speaks unusually and non-standardly, chances are they are not well-educated. Apart from that it makes my ears bleed 😅 Wouldn't wish that for those who hear me speak.
@@emeralddream5965 , one speaks unusually and non-standardly, chances are they are not well-educated - well , it`s kinda soviet or post-soviet complex though. And what kind of Russian are you if you can not define regional accent of Russian? Don`t you know that поребрик in St. Petersburg is not поребрик, but тротуар in Miscow for exanple? We here in Ukraine do know because in that way we`ve find out that the separatists from occupied Donetsk were not from Ukraine at all, but from mentioned above Petersburg region
At drama school they’ll teach it as RP and Heightened RP for the “posh english” version. On acting platforms, using Heightened RP is much more common as a term for a posh accent than “posh English” is. I only learnt about this take on it today, so I thought I’d shed some light on how these are named and used when in actor training.
Ha ha. My Cockney mother made us speak RP in the 50s. We lived on a post war council estate in a Lancashire town. She didnt want us laughed at when we went to university so we were laughed at as small children. Mind you she was right. Listen to people like Melvynn Bragg and other northern oxbridge students.
I’m only 22 now but my mum specifically sent me to a expensive nursery, so I would learn “better” english, and she also spoke rp as best she could around me as a child. It’s because we are lower class and live in somerset and she’s from Elsewhere in england and she thought the local accent was too ugly for a girl to have! I still talk in a very slightly accented rp and she laughs at me for the way I pronounce sandwich/sandwiches!😩 (I feel like I should also mention that my mum is an older mum as well...)
I'm constantly being told that I have a posh accent, I grew up and was educated at British schools in the middle East, I also happen to hark from the East Midlands, I'm very proud of my RP accent and thank you for the opportunity to offer this video as a rebuttal to the accusation of ' being posh'.
English was learned in Primary School, along with "speech / pronunciation" classes. I heard my Teachers speaking it (initially) far more than from classmates, family, or neighbors. In addition to Teachers, television 📺 also provided supplemental vocabulary.
It’s interesting compared to the US where the younger generation has largely been losing its regional accents and speaking a more general accent. This is most notable in areas that are famous for their strong accents like Brooklyn, New York. If you take a young Brooklyn native today and compared them to old Brooklyn native like Bernie Sanders and you can easily tell the difference.
Don't be fooled. The youth in the UK all talk like wannabe London 'roadmen' these days. I don't speak the dialect of the place I grew up, which has all but disappeared in this day and age - I remember the way that old people spoke when I was a kid, and almost nobody speaks that way now. All regional accents are disappearing gradually. All accents evolve over time, and the more connected we are, the more they merge together.
I'm certain that higher mobility in upper middle class also plays a part--my parents have different US regional accents and I'm told that mine is neutral half of the time and borrows vowels weirdly the other half.
@@ssl3546 One person's prejudice is another's lyricism, character, heritage, etc. 'Scary' is overstated, but I personally would hate it if everyone spoke 'Vanilla.' Or worse still A.I., Siri, Alexa. Not 'wonderful'!
when I first moved to the UK, I was very confused by the term 'public school'. Where I'm from it means state owned school where normal/poor people go, schools like Eton in my country would be called private school.
@@BenefitCounterbench They were called public schools because they were the first schools open to the public, ie, anyone who could afford to attend could go. 'Private' schools were those in royal palaces, monasteries etc where there were strict restrictions on who could attend, ie those in holy orders or members of royal households.
Very interesting video which made me reflect on my own pronunciation and accent which is very RP. I was born in Glasgow, both my parents had very modified Glaswegian accents having lived in England for years. When I was about three years old we relocated to south London and when I was 11 we moved to Cambridge. We were a working class family, my dad was a welder and my mum was a dinner lady for school meals. At school, I was often bullied for talking posh, the other kids mistook my RP for posh. Given my background I just wonder how I became an RP speaker. I am not complaining, I have been an English language teacher for more than 30 years and the one consistent piece of feedback I get from students is that I am easy to understand!
From the American Heritage Dictionary: Usage Note: The pronunciation of often with a (t) is a classic example of what is known as a spelling pronunciation. During the 1500s and 1600s, English experienced a widespread loss of certain consonant sounds within consonant clusters, as the (d) in handsome and handkerchief, the (p) in consumption and raspberry, and the (t) in chestnut and often. In this way the consonant clusters were simplified and made easier to articulate. But with the rise of public education and literacy in the 1800s, people became more aware of spelling, and sounds that had become silent were sometimes restored. This is the case with the (t) in often, which is acceptably pronounced with or without the (t). In similar words, such as soften and listen, the t has generally remained silent. I'm just some guy from Ohio, but I have always pronounced 'often' as OFF-ten. I have never once been 'corrected.'
In the late '50's, our "Language" textbooks taught us to not pronounce the "t" in "often" because it was silent. They said that was incorrect and to not pronounce it. In later years, I was surprised to learn that it actually could be correctly used.
@@kayclapp8639 I've been pronouncing the words in this video so frequently that I now think they all sound daft (darft). But , one thing I always do, is say often with a t.
Most Americans don't pronounce "often" as "affen," and some pronounce the "t," it's really a personal choice with us. This is especially true in urban coastal areas.
No it’s regional, northeast southeast Deep South west, low, middle and upperclass lot of differences in annunciation, pronunciation and accents. Most Brits think all Americans speak the same way and have the same accents.
My maternal aunts & grandparents left England for Australia in 1968… they only spoke perfect RP & one of my aunts still does. For years I thought that was just proper English… only recently did it dawn on me that very few people in the UK today still speak that way, and my relatives probably do so because they left the UK in the ‘60’s so they missed the linguistic shift back to regional dialects that’s happened since then.
*Margaret Thatcher took lessons to move from her Lincolnshire accent to sounding like the Duchess of Devonshire. And the former England captain, David Beckham, who used to speak cockney is trying to speak with an RP accent these days!*
@@auracle6184 His voice coaching is one thing, and his poshification is another thing. It's no secret that David Beckham has lately been poshing up his accent.
They once did a survey in Poland about the Polish language. And they found that the language that is most standard and conforming to the norms is the one spoken in Szczecin and Wrocław. Two biggest cities gained by Poland after IIWW, where most of the citizens are descended from people recently resettled from other areas. This shows, that similar to the RP, the “standard” way of speaking is often one that nobody speaks locally, but will be used as a “neutral” way to communicate by people from different backgrounds.
It is very common for people who want to get involved with Radio or Television in the USA to move to New Mexico, namely Albuquerque, where a large majority of the population speak with a pretty near flawless Standard American English accent. It’s really weird for me as a person growing up there, I remember one of the first times I saw the news in another region, and I was perplexed why they were not speaking in the local accent, like we did in New Mexico. Then, I picked up German, and as a foreign fluent speaker, I of course sound German but not _from_ anywhere in Germany.
The same goes for the Czech Republic. The most standard language is the language of the former Sudetenland, where the German population was expulsed from.
@@Natalia-tq6wv I'm not sure if that counts as a movie, since it's actually an American production of an operetta that first premiered in 1879. The only proper Brit in the cast is Angela Lansbury as Ruth. If you want the movie version, that's actually on UA-cam. But there are also many other performances in UA-cam , many by English companies.
@@Natalia-tq6wv I'm American, so I don't know a lot, but I'd look for any movie featuring Jack Buchanan or George Formby, who had the additional benefit of having slid a lot past the censors.
I just watched "My Fair Lady" with my daughter and this is such an interesting background information--it really explains the exposition of the story--why Professor Higgins studied the English regional dialects, and why Eliza sought out Higgins to take elocution lessons. Thank you!
She wanted to work in an 'at shop where it was warm and dry indoors rather than a flower stall in English weather as I recall. That might be more Pygmalion than MFL but the idea is the same - she wanted to better herself.
MFL does explicitly tell Eliza's motivation is to learn to speak properly so she can get a job at a flower shop. With her thick accent, she'd be stuck as a flower girl in the streets. A fun linguistic detail suited for this video's theme is the conclusion of the bet where Higgins' rival determines that Eliza's English is too perfect for her to be English, so he guesses she's Hungarian.
My sister lived in Ireland for a decade and then in England. After a time, the Irish almost always took her for English and the English thought that she was Irish. In fact she was an American, who, in her early twenties, spoke with a very noticeable Texas "twang".
Omg, for the life of me I can't figure out if I pronounce the 't' in often or not. I've been saying it both ways for the last 5 minutes, and they both sound weird to me now.
Sorry, if find ofTen to sound irritating. Indexes irritating. Indices sounds much better. Most financial writers seem to have forgotten that. Henry Higgins was right. REx Harrison good example of elegant English pronunciation
In Norway we were first taught "proper" English in elementary school, but then somewhere around grade 7 we started to switch to a more "general American" English. Though a trick some kids did use was to speak with an overly posh English accent and it usually gave them better grades lol. I still find myself randomly using colour and armour for some reason
While American English is more common orally in Norwegian classes and society due to media influence, British English is what's officially being taught in Norwegian schools. I also use "ou" rather than "o" in those cases, because that's what we were being taught, and it's better to be consistent rather than to switch between the two.
Please don't call British English "proper" as opposed to American English. Both dialects are equally valid forks of the English that was spoken when the British colonized America. The two branches evolved over time as every language does. In fact, linguists say American English has stayed closer to the English spoken back then, while British English has changed more.
Very interesting, the same happens with Italian language: if you listen to TV or Radio the speakers use quite often a kind of pronunciation you'd hear in Rome or central Italy as well but if you talk to people there are huge differences between different regions
Alessandro Visigalli Or Switzerland where people know their local dialect, a regional language, and the national language. Particularly where mountains have isolated people from a lot of outsiders, new dialects have emerged even short distances apart. Germany taught High German as a unifier across dialects. France is also very particular about their unifier. As the US media was not state run, there was never a central idea that dictated how people should talk or act. Local newspapers and then broadcasts tended to sound and look local, UNLESS someone had aspirations to rise to national stardom and then they tried to emulate their idols. Eventually diversity was more prized than uniformity. It was predicted Americans would sound the same by now but we are more diverse than ever, with rules being broken with impunity.
I’ve also noticed this. I’m from South Wales (and sometimes you can hear it!) but because I had severe speech impediments when I was a kid I was ‘trained’ to speak in RP. Years later at Oxford I very quickly recognised the difference between the majority of people (who spoke with either clear regional or international accents), the minority of people who spoke in something approximating RP (maybe they were just from the right social strata in England or went to a British International school), and the tiny minority who were just straight-up posh
I do speak RP as well. I'm from Germany, so that falls perfectly into your category of being educated outside the UK. When I talk to people in the UK they oftentimes are not able to tell where I am from, and are very astonished to hear that I'm a German.
The Queen has actually changed her accent over the course of her reign. Go listen to some of her speeches in the 1950s and compare it to how she spoke in the last part of the 20th century (before her voice became 'old lady")
I once met a guy at an amusement park who was visiting the US from Wales. It was the most awkward language barrier I've ever experienced. I could tell he was speaking English by picking out words here and there but mostly sounded like jibberish. To this day, I'm still haunted by the idea that I probably answered simple questions like "what's your name?" Or "where are you from?" incorrectly.
I was in Edinburgh when I was 18. I am American. I was trying to ask for directions, and people very kindly explained things to me, but I couldn’t understand one word that they said. Then I met this guy who was born and raised in Edinburgh, and we went to get a drink. I think he had a hard time understanding me, and I had a hard time understanding him. I was really surprised.
As a Canadian trying to understand different accents from the different contries it is not only words themselves which may be harder to understand but the many unique idioms and nicknames. These are so numerous and quite baffling.
Really confused by the use of "east midlands" to mean regions around Oxford & Cambridge. I have always used it to refer to Leicester, Nottingham, Derby etc.
That's because Oxford, Cambridge and that aren't in the current region of the East Midlands - they're in the South. They were in the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, which ecompased the current day West and East Midlands as well as a bit of the South, but yeah. East Mids is most definitely Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Lincoln, Rutland, with Northampton at the bottom (speaking as someone from just south of Nottingham)
Very interesting and very informative. Many thanks. I'm now know that I am very old fashioned and understand that I am part of the less than 3%!! Good grief! By the way, POSH comes from the old 1930's on those lovely cruise liners when the higher classes were always given cabins on the cooler side of the ship so as not to obtain the afternoon heat, so it was always Port Out, Starboard Home. It is said that POSH was stamped on the tickets.
@@rogerturner5504 Fewer is for countable things; less than is for things that are measured. If "fewer than" was used with 3% would imply that one could count all the amounts of percent that were "fewer than 3%". For example 0%, 1%, 2%. In fact there are uncountably infinite (using these terms as used in maths) amounts of percent between 0% and 3%. Some examples are: 0.5%, 1.6%, 2.2567898765% and uncountable infinite more. So percent is a measurement, and "less than 3%" is the correct usage.
For me as a german this is quite interesting because we don't have accents according to social class per se. Accents are mainly a regional thing, but having no accent whatsoever is common in general. I'm from bavaria where people if speaking a dialect usually have a pretty strong one, but about 90% of us either don't use it or aren't even able to use it because we're not used to it. Of course the places we are from reflect in some pronunciations of words, but it's pretty hard to differentiate because it's fairly subtle. However there are many people who speak german with arabic or turkish influences and those are really easy to tell apart from 'normal german', since not only words tend to be used differently, but also their pronunciation of combinations like 'ch' is different. But we don't have such grave differences in language as british english for example does
I had a dear friend, now long deceased, who was the daughter of a school-master in Thuringer Wald. To my astonishment, she had great contempt for all things Bavarian, an attitude I found unnecessary for someone of her intelligence and bearing, and thus downright amusing.
@@waltperry5781 yeah that's probably down to georgraphic reasons because my father is from Coburg, a town in northern bavaria that couldn't be closer to Thüringen (the region/state just north of bavaria), and there everyone despises Thüringen and its people. That's just a rivalry thing that children are taught to remain the culture. I'm sorry for your loss though. She seemed to be quite an entertaining person
As an English speaker attempting to learn German, I would expect my pronunciation of the language is abhorrent, however I like to believe that I'm improving. 😅
There is also much less differentiation of "posh"/"common" in France, too. Regional and educational-level differences yes, but not so much class difference.
I find it interesting that German doesn’t have an upper class accent. In the UK the upper class always wanted to be seen as above the middle class commoners and one of the ways they did this was by using a different accent that they decided sounded more higher class and fancy. Someone from the upper class to know they’re from the upper class so they would do anything they could do differentiate themselves from the common people. They wouldn’t want to be misidentified as someone from the dirty working class.
Thank you for telling us how the "a" in English is all about. I was taught abroad and the teacher always taught us to pronounce the "a" as somewhere between [a:] and [e]. When I say the word "apple" to people in Liverpool, they pretended they did not understand what I was trying to buy. I had no idea either it was in fact I pronounced the word "apple" incorrectly all my life, or they just purely did not understand me. Anyway I adapted my pronunciation to [a:]pple instead, in fact I now pronounce all letter A as in [a:] after. Now I know it is just another way to pronounce it in Britain, and I did not pronounce it wrong initially.
Novak Ingood I think that’s the point. It’s “old fashioned” because not many people speak that way. He grew up in Zanzibar/India in the 50s/60s and schools would have taught that way.
Excellent video. I remember when I was in York in the 80's as a teenager, just having learnt basic English at school in Poland, I went to a little shop to buy a pack of matches. I said "mætʃəs pliːs", or "mɛtʃəs pliːs". The seller widened his eyes and started to mock me for a couple of minutes, pretending not to understand even when I showed with my hands what I was after. He even asked if I wanted maps. :D After the grilling, when I was just about to give up, he suddenly said "Aha! Mɑːtʃiːz!", pronouncing the vowels for, like, 3 seconds. This was the first time I understood there was no kidding with British accents.
So, the Crawley's from Downton Abbey had a posh accent, and that's why it was so difficult for me to understand them at first. I didn't know if it was a regional thing or what (hard to explain, because their house staff didn't speak like that). This is very interesting, thank you!
The Crawleys were of course actors who had varying approximations of an old school posh accent. To my ear Edith sounded the most "posh", and Lord Grantham sounded much less so. Mary also sounded quite posh.
Can you explain why recent generations in the US have embraced the standard non-regional accent while the UK has seemingly moved in the opposite direction? Does it have anything to do with urbanization patterns?
@@masoncrowley2777 It’s an abrasive accent for sure, but nowhere nearly as bad as the Long Island accent, another regional American dialect still going strong.
I though that I spoke standard non-regional American English until I arrived at a university in Indiana and learned that my accent is Californian, and, of course, California is huge, so there are regional subdivisions of Californian English.
I actually think you have a considerably stronger regional accent then you assess yourself to have, it stands out fairly strongly to me and is very distinctive, particularly when you compare it to someone like Freddie Mercury. If it was a scale from 'pure Scouse' serving as our 100 point for the strongest regional accent (perhaps some Scottish accents are stronger but they get quite dialect-y when they get very strong) and Freddie as say 10 for near pure RP I would place you probably about 40 or 50
I knew he was from London straightaway because of how he said London 😂 I would suggest this is a Grammar School London accent like Roger Daltry and Alan Johnson.
When I was teaching ELS in Korea I had a lot of students who had lived for years in the UK and it was cook to hear that RP coming out of their mouths. "Teacher, I need the dictionary. That enormous one." "It's not a flashlight -- it's a *torch*!" Another kid had the RP accent but made standard Korean grammar and syntax errors which made her particularly charming.
Would you mind providing some examples of RP with standard Korean grammar and syntax errors? Sounds intriguing! Alongside the genuine question, that was my best attempt at RP)
@@DjurslandsEfterskole I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I just remember the feeling I'd get hearing Wendy make the same grammar and syntax mistakes as her classmates but doing it with that flawless accent.
So interesting! I learnt an awesome mixture of R.P. and Posh-accent in school in Austria during the seventies. I didn’t know and didn’t think about. In the States they realized that but thought it to be normal as I’m from Europe. Nowadays an American pronunciation is far more common at school, also in Austria. I really enjoy watching your videos on different accents and their history. Thanks a lot to you and the algorithm which has suggested your videos to me.
Interesting to hear about the shift from RP to regional accents, as I just got turned away from a job interview and told my accent was "unprofessional". I have an Edinburgh accent - considered one of the poshest Scottish accents. Regardless, I was shocked that they would even consider a person's accent in employment. I wouldn't have had any issues being turned away (I'm sure there were other reasons) but the fact they had the fucking nerve to comment on my accent?!?! Jesus, I feel like I dodged a bullet there
@@clairemcconway6266 Nah, we just refer to England as part of the Brits, therefore it's British. Also it sounds confusing when you use English in its place because folks are going to be confused if you are referring to the language or the specific dialect of the *English* language
Ah, but what sort of Edinburgh accent do you have? The Morningside "Miss Jean Brodie" one where a creche is a collision between two motor vehicles? (does anyone under 50 still speak like that, by the way?). Or the rather less-posh variants? I had a cousin who lived her entire life just off Easter Road and another from Trinity who sounded quite different from each other. (I should say that although I was a student for 5 years in Edinburgh in the 1980s, I never quite got familiar enough with the various Edinburgh accents to pinpoint them accurately).
@@ToaOfFusion hey, I consider myself British as my mother is Welsh. We obviously have very different views on what Britain is, but I think you're really writing off a whole group of people with such a blanket statement as Britain = England. I struggled with my national identity growing up so having that catchall "I'm British" was really helpful. Sorry if this comes off as rude, I just want to present a different side of the argument to you :)
When I was growing up probably more than 66% of my locality spoke a form of RP. From elocution perfect to a watered down version. Quite regularly I'd get an impromptu lesson from my late mother: "S-o-u-n-d your words!" and "The Rain in Spain etc etc".
And here i am, with my "i learned english by reading books and i can't pronounce some sounds and also my mothertounge is interferring a lot"-accent. I'm surprised, that people understand me.
SuperSkyhorse Ever read Tarzan books? Even being raised by apes, he learned English with a posh accent from reading books. (He was born an aristocrat so spoke it naturally??) :D Luckily for you, there is a ton online and in recorded books. I can understand most British and their former colonies' accents because of that. For me, the hardest accent is Northern Ireland, in the comedy news show on BBC Radio Ulster/internet The Hole in the Wall Gang. Talk slowly, use gestures, write it down if need be...we'll figure out what you mean.
I'm studying Linguistics and English Literature, and the accent we are learning is English RP. This year is my third year of career, and we have always spoken about this matter, but didn't understand fully because as you said, and what my faculty explained to me, it can be confused with posh English. Indeed, until I saw your video I always thought RP accent was posh English, because the BBC and polititians. But I'm glad to see it is not that exactly. Although, I can see with more clarity why this accent has so many discusses in my university: “we sound so British that no one will believe we are British at all.”
Posh people pronounce ‘valet’ with the T! Or more likely manservant! ‘When there is a good English word we use it. Not the French word.’ My English grandmother used say. Hence napkin not serviette.
I think it’s pretty divided. I’ve heard old rich pronounce it both ways, but yeah I’m sure there was a certain kind of nationalism about not pronouncing the T
My grandfather spoke Queen's English. Not RP, actual Queen's. I loved listening to him tell stories because he sounded so overly posh and I always felt like I was taken back to the 1920's. Meanwhile I speak pure RP as I grew up in the South East. I pronounce my T's, I say months not mumfs, etc. :)
I live in the UK. Sometimes I in American dramas there is a character that sounds very odd to me, and then I realise that they are supposed to have a British English accent. The various American accents just sound normal to me. I would probably not notice if the British character just had an American accent. Maybe what I am hearing with the supposed British accent is just someone struggling or feeling awkward.
The Queen's English means something much more archaic over here in the US. I'm trying to learn more about the peculiarities of British English from your videos. It is fascinating to also hear the similarities that persist in the English of my native central Appalachia where West Virginia, east Kentucky and SE Ohio come together.
The Queens accent has definitely changed. And younger members of the Royal Family tend to speak with a more RP accent. Prince William sounds less posh than Boris Johnson, for example.
@@em3000 Boris Johnson’s accent is perhaps a little put-on (read: not toned-down like most of his Elton contemporaries) but is certainly genuine. He comes from a family that is certainly not nouveau-riche. position as a
Thank you very much for a well-made and interesting video. I have always felt it exactly how you defined it: It is not about class or region. Just as loving opera doesn't mean upper class as some think, but love of art music and drama. Now I know why a friend said I spoke better English than they did (West Midlands) and why a stranger in London said I was "middle class". My English teacher in the Waldorf school spoke beautiful RP. I remember wondering why my class-mates didn't much, as I lived there as an "exchange student". I also get why the audience laughs so when Mr Bean says "Hwhat and other Queen's English speech. the fun in it for a foreigner is the exaggeration, whereas we think the accent to be perfectly normal.
Most English accents (from the UK), in my experience, are more difficult for non-native speakers to learn than “standard American”. We technically learned RP in my school, but as we got older, almost everyone moved over to speaking with a “standard” American accent. Later on, we were also given a choice to use American or UK spelling, as long as we were consistent in our writing, and not mixing the two. I’m not sure how to explain it, other than American being more “flat” somehow. It’s just easier to “fit” in the mouth. 😅
Well the standard North American accent is more like earlier English; it dates to before the Hanovers re-injected England with German pronunciation and got the upper classes to sound like they filled their mouths with marbles.
Most people would choose the American spelling, because it contains fewer letters lol . I'm American, (yet an Anglophile) & I began writing the British way - in middle school (thank you Agatha Christie!) & I was made fun of by my peers & deemed a "snob" & "pseudo-intellectual".... to each their own! My *favourite* *colour* is *grey* !! 😏😉
@@normalabbie It felt so weird when I first started seeing 'color' and 'favorite' because I have used 'colour' and 'favourite' my whole life. But now I end up mixing words like 'traveling' and 'travelling'. The line is getting more and more blur until I won't be able to differentiate between them anymore.
@@o0...957 possibly because MS word often makes, for example, Australian spelling the same as American spelling , which is crap. I put my setting to English from UK. Also twitter and we based emails often has the incorrect American spelling in it. It is a forced acceptance of American spelling , like a disease, infecting the world.
I grew up in the middle of North Carolina (US) and a lot the pronunciations of British words remind me of the country folks back home. Probably because we descend from British Colonists. I've even had people mistake my Southern accent for a British accent. Especially when I was a beginner at annunciating around non-Southerners. It orften came across as British.😄
I agree completely with your characterization of the Piedmont NC accent. It was pointed out to me when I first moved to London to work. And SC low country sounds a bit like certain Scots accents
What a delight to find your channel “old bean.” Being from America’s northern midwest (Ohio) I feel I have the least recognizable ( or most benign) regional accent of all. So I do spend too much time trying to adopt the accents I hear from British TV series. Don’t judge me. I just want to sound important.😊 Thanks for your highly informative videos. Learning about the posh accent explains much.
It is common for just about everyone to think of their native accent as being the most "benign". If you were to go to New York or Boston, for example, they'd likely peg you as Midwestern pretty quickly. Our own accent always sounds the most "normal" to our own ear.
A slight correction: Harry, Prince William, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and the other younger royals use RP, whereas the Queen, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne use "posh English". Why half of the Queen's children use RP is a mystery.
The r pronounced in "better (r)every day" wouldn't be intrusive, just linking. An intrusive r is one that's inserted when it's not in the spelling, like "China (r)and Japan".
@Ken Hudson I live in Washington. It used to be relative common among native Washingtonians who were somewhat poorer than average. This has changed a lot over the last 60 years. Now I seldom hear it from anyone younger than 55.
Is this actually a thing? Never lived in an English-speaking country, but I've spoken English since I was a child and I don't think I've ever heard the intrusive r...
It was an eye-opener when I helped a Chinese colleague transcribe interviews recorded with otherwise well-spoken suburban native students and realise that even I sometimes had difficulty. I appreciate having been exposed to BBC radio in my childhood, but am happy to have added some of the characteristics of my West Country home. (Though I was teased and nicknamed "Bamber" (Gascoigne) when I first left school and did manual work.) Part of my eagerness to retire to France is to see what sort of French accent I naturally acquire ...
I'm no expert, but I find in places like Jersey some words have survived from the French, but the pronunciation doesn't sound like modern French. Your accent in France will depend on who you learn it from and what region you move to. It can be difficult to learn to speak French or Spanish without an "English" accent, but with work it can be done.
My dad insisted I pronounce it as if the 'c' wasn't there: shed-yule. But 'sked' is very widespread too. 'shed' sounds posher to me - whether that is the same thing as correct is a matter of opinion....
I was born in West Yorkshire as the son of a co-op grocery van driver. Our neighbours included peg-legs from the 1st war, and they spoke 'broad Yorkshire' which I understand perfectly but don't use (much), unless I am in Yorkshire and drunk. My career took me to European Group Finance Director for 28 companies..so I might have had to go to London every month and invest 100 million in a pension fund and mix with top end Londoners. When I (early) retired 19 years ago, I moved to the US. My wife is from Milwaukee. I considered my accent sophisticated neutral RP. I went to Home Depot in Menomonee Falls WI, and the cashier said "You are from Yorkshire". I was discovered and I was shocked ! He said "I used to share an apartment with a guy from Yorkshire"....
I thought that the postillion was the servant who rode on the step on the back so that when you stopped you had a servant to help you out of the carriage (thus having one on a motor car was rare in the 1900s and gone by the start of WWI, except for the formal coaches used by the Queen going to Parliament or Westminster).
My Dad grew up in Gloucester, and due to his undiagnosed dyslexia was streamed into trades after failing various levels. At 81 he’s an incredibly skilled joiner. We live in Canada; my departed Mum was born in Churchdown and went to Pates School for Girls in Cheltenham. Both of my parents spoke in RP, though sometimes would slip into a posh accent to put on airs lol but they never really took on the regional Canadian accent of southwestern Ontario. And while it wasn’t their usual way of speaking, I also got to know the West Country accent that my aunt and uncle back home spoke with.
3%! 😵 As a child I began trying to alter my heavy Australian accent to sound like what I now know is RP. I still sound Australian, I just try hard to be as eloquent as possible within our dialect. After a lifetime of coaching myself to speak 'correctly' you can my imagine my absolute shock horror in the 00's when English migration to Aus hit overdrive and all these strange unintelligible accents started popping up! There's nothing funnier than someone from the North of England asking you where in England you originally came from and not being able to understand what they are saying through their thick muddled accents 😂
Aussie accent is so good! I love it! But I can feel it for you! I was surprised to learn from a londoner that so many young people in London are trying not to speak proper English. That's a pity...
@@jajangmyeon7951 well, don't worry. I am sure many people will admire your English. My assumption is that young people express their protest with skewed English, sort of, the opposite to the "high class". I guess the idea of layering the society into classes is something youngsters are trying to get away from. However, I've never lived in London, so for me, it is hard to reason about the root causes. But I am definitely sure that such trends exist, google "norf london", for example :)
The London regional accent has gained ground during my lifetime, displacing local dialects in the neighbouring counties. I am very sad that Sussex dialect has largely died out. I always wanted to speak with an educated Sussex accent, but in trying to avoid "estuary English" I have largely lost my local sound. Except, that is, if I find myself in a pub where local dialect is spoken, when I quickly fall into the old ways.
Hahaha the skit was so funny I loved it😂 Also I'm not a native English speaker and my pronunciation is very close to RP it's just so fascinating to me that we all learn RP but in fact very few natives actually speak it.
@desertrosereads WAS the standard accent of the BBC - less so nowadays. It is also true to say that in my lifetime (over 65 years) that accent has changed considerably, as, indeed, has the Queen's. I do have to say that when I hear a 'British' accent on American tv shows, it invariably sounds false, or 'too good to be true' to my ears, unless spoken by a British person, who may have learnt the accent at RADA (acting school), but is able to use it as their own. I am often suprised by the number of Australian actors that effect a 'British' accent in these roles as well, as though either American TV doesn't think brits can do such an accent, or maybe they just can't afford us! Who knows....
@@Yiran not literally never, Ethan. A rarity in our community, but not 'never'. I have a friend who speaks RP. Born in Hull (north of England), raised in the Midlands - he never did explain to me how he gained his affected accent, but he sticks out a mile as soon as he opens his mouth.
That was so much fun! I never quite understood the "source" of RP, nor what made something posh. I am from the U.S. I absolutely love it that Freddie Mercury spoke RP--and so does Richard E. Grant.
You sound more “London” than “neutral” RP to my ear. I lived in Hertfordshire and Berkshire for ~10 years and knew a bunch of people who went to boarding school (not Eton) and they had a very proper BBC RP type accent, not posh but more enunciated and less nasal than how you speak. (I have a middle class East Coast US accent so the result of that with 10 years soaking in British accents was... an accent completely indistinguishable from a common accent from Toronto, Canada. Go figure.)
My first language is Russian and the first British I was immersed in was when I did my A-levels at a public school in Hertfordshire. It was honestly the best thing that happened for my accent, those kids speak like most strive to. Hertfordshire accent is beautiful.
A classmate and I were so fed up with RP at school that we randomly switched to Americanized English, even during oral exams, and the teachers had to cut us off. Imagine a teacher speaking _so_ RP that her "I think" sounds like "I sink"... It was hilarious.
I speak RP. I went to a State school and didn’t go to university until I was 30. I was born in the Derby and whilst it is in the East Midlands, I wouldn’t say that most of my friends spoke RP and my brother was bullied for speaking ‘posh’. The way we speak, was down to my family and how we spoke at home. Both of my parents were born in Derby, so it seems a very complex issue. I have worked for many years for a company with 17 different nationalities and we only speak English at work. Therefore it is very important that those of us who speak English as a first language, speak it carefully and in a manner that doesn’t cause misunderstanding
I don't know who this presenter is, nor his qualifications. But to me he sounds like a Londoner consciously speaking with clearer diction for the benefit of his audience. That is, not RP.
''If your accent is perfect, it means you are educated abroad''... That made me chuckle. True.
my ex-gf from Belarus said that I didn't say the letter 'h' properly; she said I had to pronounce it 'aitch' not 'haitch'. I dumbed her very quickly.
@@isaaccraft2050 lmao barely ever see any reference to Belarus
@@isaaccraft2050 Oh my god, yes- my mum says "haitch" and it drives me fucking mad hahah
@@isaaccraft2050 She is right.
I’m South African and I definitely speak better English than most English people
“You could barely understand the man, he was that posh. It was not so much speech as modulated yawning.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!
I love Terry Pratchett
RIP taken too early
Hah! That’s a good one. RIP Terry Prachett.
The man who taught me how to speak in a Scottish accent with his Wee Free Men books 😆
Sounds like Jacob Reese-Mogg hahaha!
LOL!!! Great description! 😋👍😁
Its worth noting that the key strength of RP isn't the number of people who speak it, it's the number of people who understand it, which is absolutely everybody who can understand english. If you intend to learn english you would pretty much always choose to learn RP.
A hundred percent agree
Exactly! That's why I believe that there should be an International Standard English. I can say that American Standard is unaccented and that RP is very mildly accented. Many would disagree. A mildly bent vowel isn't much of a concern but if it's bent to the point of matching a different vowel, you get one word sounding the same as another.
If I was to drop into Scotland, I'd probably understand less than half of what they say but they would have no trouble understanding me.
Either American Standard or RP is a good baseline to start from. Anyone leaning English as a 2nd language should learn either one of those two and I think it would be advisable to spend a few years fussing over how to unite them into one International Standard. I've been promoting a phonemic alphabet consisting of 34 characters. A fully phonemic English alphabet where you spell what you say would result in people spelling words according to their local dialect, which means that accents would not just be heard by the ears, but they would, albeit to a lesser extent, also be seen in the language of the eye - namely the written word. This would make having an International Standard for spelling and pronunciation much more important.
@@7MPhonemicEnglish I've been living in the UK ten yeas and I still can't understand half of what people say around here. Almost everyone understands me save one or two people who mistook "back" for "bag."
@@impishrebel5969 hmmm. Do you think that it's mainly accent or is it lack of proper enunciation? I know that where I live, I have to deal with thick Spanish accent which is bad enough but then on top of that there's often the toothless, low-income, low I.Q. bumpkin who just plain never learned to speak English, so I catch about 20% of their words or just enough to discern that English is the language they're targeting.
eeh, in the US, often people would make me repeat when i didn't speak with an american pronounciation. Asking for a glass of water in restaurants was often a mystery, until i asked again for a glass of "wodder"..
Seems lots of americans aren't used to hearing anything else than american english ^^ The grammar of RP is certainly universal, but the phonems, certainly not. Still, it's the most widely understood one.
Today I learned that when people refer to RP as "the Queen's English", they mean Queen, the band, not Her Majesty.
He basically said "I pronounce words according to the book written in 1926. That's why I sound weird." That cracks me up as well.
That's for sure the best example I have ever read. Stealing. 😁
Myself build my pronunciation via listening to BBC far in the south of Uzbekistan. And that guy from Zanzibar had clear marks of Hindustan aligned RP.
@@uzbekuncle "that guy from Zanzibar" and "Hindustan" makes me feel such... interesting feelings.
India, friend, is the generally accepted appellation right now.
I'm not sure about that one, MrVovansim. I had a subject at the Faculty called Phonetics of the English and at some point we talked about the synonyms for RP. Among many synonyms, such as BBC English, there was the "King's English". The professor talked about it and said that today it is rather referred to as "Queen's English" since the Queen herself is the reigning monarch, after King George ascended the throne in 1936. So my assumption, although I don't know as much about it, is that before referring to RP as "Queen's English" it used to be "King's English" before the accession of Her Majesty to the throne.
Sure, Freddie had a pure RP accent and that may be the truth, but there was also the "King's English" earlier, before Her Majesty, which doesn't really make sense if we're talking about the band. If you see what I mean :)
I may be wrong, and correct me if I am, I'm just trying to learn more about RP since I think I'll do my PhD thesis on it.
Wow this is interesting. I moved to the southern US from Taiwan as a very young child; I was already speaking Mandarin fluently, but didn't have a regional accent. I continued to speak it at home and was soon sent to Chinese school on weekends to learn reading and writing. I didn't regularly go back to visit family in Asia until about 10 years later, and though I'm still fluent, was surprised and slightly disappointed that almost every local I spoke to would ask me if I was from/visiting from America - this happened even more frequently/earlier in conversations in China. One Taiwanese shop owner finally told me she guessed I was visiting from/raised in America because my Mandarin was "too perfect"; she said she couldn't guess where I was from and my pronunciation was "textbook". Pretty cool to find out there are parallels across languages... 🤔
A Taiwanese here. I would love to hear you speak Mandarin! 🤣🤣🤣
When I moved to San Francisco in 70s I remembered being surprised to find out my Chinese American co worker was studying Mandarin. She explained she had known only Cantonese from her relatives.
I have a friend from London. She’s grown up there but originally from Russia. She’s young but sounds like a ghost. Some of her words could be found in old books but no one in Russia speaks that way anymore
You know why? Because you pronounced every single word too clearly......! Few native speakers did like that. They could judge you in the very first time.
Not that you might know, however I wonder if South Koreans speak with a twang in their speech like American Southerners do in relation to North Korean speakers.
I was completely blown out when I first visited England for the first time as an adult able to talk English (learnt in Australia, and made myself a lot of international friends over the years) : I couldn’t understand ANYONE nor ANYTHING, my brain just DIDN’T REGISTER the language people talked as being English, and got itself convinced that I was actually hearing German (like when you write something in Google Translate and it fails to autodetect the source language). I needed a few full days to adapt, it was a crazy experience.
I'm an American English speaker and I have to enable CC when watching British TV shows lol.. None of those shows now use RP and I just have a hard time understanding cockney which a lot of their shows feature now.
@@jkid4855 I think growing up with the Redwall books and hearing a large range of accents in shows means I can usually still understand a lot of accents… but if you dropped me in the English countryside I would be struggling.
I learned American English and when I came to London first time I did not understand anyone. With time it got better
Britain.........
While teaching college-level English and "moonlighting" as a lowly dishwasher and cook's assistant in a San Francisco Bay Area restaurant run by a German, a Swiss, and a Dane, I was struck (hearing them converse with their various friends in their own native languages) by just how much the sounds and cadences of their own languages sounded like English.
"Her English is too good," he said "That clearly indicates that she is foreign" My Fair Lady. But of course you knew that.
She must be Hungarian
The queen has german blood.
heheh was chatting with a friend about some videogame dialogue bits that were a bit painful for their slightly off grammar and word usage, and that particular line popped in my head when I realised the developer was Hungarian when I thought they were British.
@@jrkjalique posh is a german slang ; )))
@@jrkjalique so?
One of my first jobs in London (2000), as a foreign student, was in a beauty salon and one of the beauticians said I had a huge advantage because my accent was foreign and people would forgive mispronunciations, while hers was cockney and that was classified lower than mine and would never be forgiven of any mistakes.
That's funny.
True that
No jodas!! o_O
Very true!
*Grins* 😖🤯
Being a foreigner who learned English in England, and being myself a language teacher, I always look to the mouth of a native speaker to understand how he or she “builds” the phonemes. It’s rather interesting to watch your videos and learn more! How kind of you to make these videos. Thank you ever so much.
that's very common
This video has enlightened me on why my african born professor (grew up going to a british school somewhere) has a more british sounding voice than my properly british prof
I'm a Nigerian voice actor and my default accent (spoken with family, friends, my children, etc) is RP
@@RemiOlutimayin are you a prince ?
@@karimmanaouil9354 My friends think I treat them like one
More British-sounding to you, Alexander, but not to me as an English person. It is true that so-called 'perfect' English is spoken by very few in the UK - as familiarity with the language from birth allows us not only to have accents and dialects, but to use the language as we have all learnt and can understand as a tool of communication. As a learner of foreign languages, I can never hope to have the command of any other language than I have of my own. My own is therefore maleable to me in a way that no other language is.
@ThisIsMyRealName I'm not quite sure what you're challenging. If you are truly bilingual, I don't see why you shouldn't have an equal command over both languages, though I would say that might depend on where you spent most of your time, or the exposure and type of exposure you have had to each langauge. I can hear accents from all over the UK and place them (mostly, anyway). I cannot do that with North American English (though I am learning because I am interested and study what I hear). I hear an 'American accent', or an Australian accent', which are quite different, but I've only recently learnt to distinguish, for instance, Autralian and New Zealand. I have spent long years with the French language and can hear differences between French and Canadian French, for instance, and even between Northern and Southern France, but nowhere near the finer nuances that I hear in my own language. I'm also not sure what 'more fluent pronunciation' is. To me, fluency and pronunciation are separate. Fluency is the ability to communicate easily and without hesitation. Whilst reasonable pronunciation is necessary to be understood, one can have excellent pronunciation but lack fluency, or have a good level of fluency with many errors in pronunciation. Clearly if you have exposure to more than one language from an early age, you are likely to have a good level in both. Also, 'perfect' language, I believe, only exists in the minds of teachers, and in their prize students. Native speakers use language in their own way, and the word 'perfect' just doesn't come into it!"
"if you sound too british, nobody would believe you are british'' yes quite true indeed. When I got to study in the UK in the 90s, I was so excited to put on my accent I learnt from good reliable old British tv shows, only to be told I was sounding more British than they were, and this was in Wales....where they have this sing-song rhythm to the language... (which I didn't know at that time) 😃
lol
Maybe it's because you were in Wales lol if you were in London it would have been a different story.
Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents are very different from RP or cockney, which is what people usually seem to associate with a ‘british’ accent! You likely sounded very ‘English’, rather than ‘British’, to them :)
@@davidthompson4383 I don't know mate, if I heard him trying to do a "british" accent at uni in London I would have called him a cunt
There’s no such thing as a “British” accent, there’s Scottish, Welsh, English and Northern Irish and within those massive regional and class variations so saying “I have a British accent” is totally meaningless, just as a Scot doesn’t consider himself English, the collective “British” is only meaningful for international sport, politics and war 😀
Interestingly, my mum has an rp accent for the opposite reason - she grew up with a strong Nottingham accent, but when she was teaching English as a foreign language in Germany the kids couldn't understand her, so she changed her accent to rp
16:00
After all the preliminaries, this is where the actual comparison starts.
20:00
Actual talking comparisons.
Thanks bruv
He is not a good actor, so neither accents are accurate.
@@goatlps oh shut up
Thank you
Thanks
I used to work as a tour guide in the Canaries before lockdown (I am from Sweden). After one tour, an elderly lady wanted to correct a word she said I had mispronounced. Her friend protested and said that I had been right. They got this discussion going, and ended with the conclusion that no-one are so unsure about correct English pronunciation as the English themselves.
And that word was?
Well yeah, you can reach that conclusion about any country and their native language. It's the way it is.
Having lived in Sweden in the early 80s, I went to Kursverkshamnet (from memory) in Vaxjo (without umlauts), to learn Swedish.
Swedes from Stockholm could not understand people from Blekinge (where I worked), or even Goteborg, and would converse in, Standard English. Even in those days, a teenage Swedish school pupil (not "student") spoke better English than most british people.
Ho-hum ...
Slante.
Scone?
@@isladurrant2015 🤣 The sure sign of a fake "English" person: does _not_ have a strong view of the "correct" way to pronounce that word!
Accents are an unbelievably fascinating thing. I’m from Ireland and despite having only 5 million people, we have thousands of distinct accents. Posh north Dublin, Lower class Dublin, Posh south Dublin, Kerry, Midlands, Cork, the list goes on and on and on changing wildly across the country. It really is very interesting.
Love this comment, very well explained ❤️
what accent does conor mcregeor has?
i think the only place that takes it further than the british isles is china, where things have diverged to the point that the country is home to hundreds of, not accents, but regional LANGUAGES that all have various levels of inter-intelligibility between each other despite having identical grammar and nearly perfectly symmetrical written vocabulary. they can all write back and forth between each other despite not being able to hold a conversation, as long as they both know either simplified or traditional hanzi. AND EACH OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF LANGUAGES HAS ITS OWN ACCENTS. its absurd. i love it.
@@XcaptainXobliviousXye its totally mint, although i think british isles still has china beat for amount of accents and dialects to land mass and population haha
Hi, is northern ireland accent similiar to Scottish accent?
“Public schools are private schools” makes about as much sense as anything else from England why not
There's actually a very good reason for it. People used to either be educated at home or at a public school that you would pay for. Those public schools are now regarded as private schools due to the fees meaning the school isn't available to everyone
@@-nyxhenderson7381 It would be time to change the terminology then, perhaps...
It defines the English mentality very well. For the rest of the world public refers to who can attend... In England it refers to who pays for it.......
@@herrbonk3635 Why? We understand it. I also understand the US version - and variety is, as they say, the spice of life....
Public schools are called state schools. There is also the presumption that private means elite, while American schools have increasingly turned to privately operate schools, that are accessible to the most needy.
Honestly, the whole accent dynamics in English is so excrutiatingly complex and delicate. I mean, I still can not believe that in England, middle class and upper class have different accents even if they are from the same region! When I hear English speakers talking about accents, I feel the same thing that I felt when I read about Ngoko-Krama distinction in Javanese. You know how accent-oriented English is, learning English more and more made me have a developed ear for my own native language that is Korean! I am now able to notice the subtle differences in people's accent in Korean. And I think that is at least partly due to the fact that I have been learning a language that fixates on accents variation extensively.
Hi, I'm Indonesian and also Javanese. Are you Korean learning Javanese? Wow, that's very...not usual 😀. And about Ngoko-Kromo in Javanese, it's actually a different way to speak, literally with different words with the same meaning, to an older or more respected person than you are. So I think it's not an accent. An accent in Bahasa Indonesia would be to listen to the difference pronounciation between many ethnics Indonesia has, such as by Javanese, compared to Batak or Sundanese, or even Papua from East Indonesia. Anyway, thank you for learning my language 🙏🏻😊.
It's strange that you think that considering how many regional dialects and accents exist in spoken Korean. And it is definitely not subtle.
Some people are much more tuned in to accent variations. I have noticed this directly. I am an American immigrant to Canada: some pick up on my accent while others do not. I live in Alberta and while visiting British Columbia, I have had locals comment that I don’t sound Albertan. In fact they thought I was from BC. I think my accent an American west coast accent. My pronunciation is sometimes corrected by people where I live. When I analyze the word in question, it is usually a word with more than one pronunciation suggestion, or an exception to a spelling rule in regards to pronunciation.
@@fronts3165 I'm from Alberta, but have spent half my life in Europe. Every time I go home, they ask me if I'm from Scotland or Ireland, bc they say my accent isn't Albertan with a side of Saskatoonian lol (I went to university there). I've only ever had 1 person who could tell exactly where I was from and only bc he'd spent time there and knew the accent. He even got that I'd lived in Saskatoon! (that was the freaky part lol)
I've always wondered that too. In south America where I live (Chile) , you can tell who belongs to a class seeing its appearance! Sad but true
I used to live in East Sussex and I had developed a beautiful British accent, you couldn't tell I was not from there. Now after 8 years back in Switzerland, having nobody to practice my spoken English with and because I'm influenced by movies and TV series I can hear my French accent creep up a bit and I've been asked if I were Australian 😂 I really miss speaking English everyday.
As an American born and raised in America, I am fascinated and grateful for your channel. I am learning so many things about the language I love and respect so much, learning about the school system in Britain, and so much more.
I taught English/Language Arts in elementary school (grades K - 6) here in Florida for 33 years and found the ability of students to pronounce letter sounds correctly had a big impact on reading acquisition.
I'd like to add one more feature that characterises Posh English. Posh speech is very enunciated. Surely, you've got plenty of time for proper pronunciation when you belong to the upper class while those oiks serve to and work for you.
Thus, you may allow yourself to avoid assimilation in /j + d, t, s, z/ clusters. For instance, the word 'tube' can be pronounced the way it is supposed to be pronounced according to its transcription - /tju:b/ instead of rather more common /tʃuːb/.
Funny thing, when I started to learn English I had an old Soviet dictionary with that old-fashion transcription. Just like Gideon mentioned, the sound corresponding to the final letter -y (as in 'happy') was /ɪ/ and not /i/ (in Gideon's example there's /ə/, which is rather similar). The same goes for the suffixes -less, -ness, -ed, although they are still (especially -ed) pronounced with /ɪ/ (and not /ə/ or even /e/) in BE.
Only after graduating from high school did I find out that there are a lot of other accents (not simply BE and AE). What did I do to shift from that unnatural posh version of my manner of articulation? Made a research and switched to contemporary RP / Estuary English. Which was just a lax type of Posh English to me. Nonetheless, I still preserve some 'old-fashioned' features in my English like that /-ʊə/ in tour, sure etc. Just because I like the sound of it and that pronunciation seems to me more 'adequate' in 'letter-sound' relation. Probably because I'm Russian and that's crucial for me.
Very interesting. I cut the phonetics bit short but I'm glad you fleshed it out a bit here.
@@LetThemTalkTV , my pleasure! The thing is, I'm overly focused on phonetics in general. In regard to English, I know that many people (you amongst them) say - 'Don't you bother about sounding foreign. Don't worry about your accent. As long as you're understood, everything's alright!' Except it isn't 😥 Let me elaborate.
It's quite natural for people to judge others by their looks. In our case, we are judged by the accent. And the last thing I personally would like to hear is - 'Mate, you're from (country of origin), right?' Because it shows me that I haven't studied well enough.
And again, in my country we don't have regional accents in a way you have them in the English speaking world. (Strictly speaking we do, but those are simply slight variations of the 'standard' speech.) Thus, if one speaks unusually and non-standardly, chances are they are not well-educated. Apart from that it makes my ears bleed 😅 Wouldn't wish that for those who hear me speak.
@@emeralddream5965 , one speaks unusually and non-standardly, chances are they are not well-educated - well , it`s kinda soviet or post-soviet complex though. And what kind of Russian are you if you can not define regional accent of Russian? Don`t you know that поребрик in St. Petersburg is not поребрик, but тротуар in Miscow for exanple? We here in Ukraine do know because in that way we`ve find out that the separatists from occupied Donetsk were not from Ukraine at all, but from mentioned above Petersburg region
@@crowe2508 it's бордюр in Moscow.
Bloody (literally) soviets went posh xD
At drama school they’ll teach it as RP and Heightened RP for the “posh english” version. On acting platforms, using Heightened RP is much more common as a term for a posh accent than “posh English” is. I only learnt about this take on it today, so I thought I’d shed some light on how these are named and used when in actor training.
Ha ha. My Cockney mother made us speak RP in the 50s. We lived on a post war council estate in a Lancashire town. She didnt want us laughed at when we went to university so we were laughed at as small children. Mind you she was right. Listen to people like Melvynn Bragg and other northern oxbridge students.
had no idea he was northern - mad!
Your mum was a woman of vision.
That is very sad!
I’m only 22 now but my mum specifically sent me to a expensive nursery, so I would learn “better” english, and she also spoke rp as best she could around me as a child. It’s because we are lower class and live in somerset and she’s from Elsewhere in england and she thought the local accent was too ugly for a girl to have! I still talk in a very slightly accented rp and she laughs at me for the way I pronounce sandwich/sandwiches!😩 (I feel like I should also mention that my mum is an older mum as well...)
@@wrentherainfalls2925 your english should not be the parameter of your knowledge
I'm constantly being told that I have a posh accent, I grew up and was educated at British schools in the middle East, I also happen to hark from the East Midlands, I'm very proud of my RP accent and thank you for the opportunity to offer this video as a rebuttal to the accusation of ' being posh'.
that sounds awesome!!!!!
Are there British state schools in the middle east?
English was learned in Primary School, along with "speech / pronunciation" classes. I heard my Teachers speaking it (initially) far more than from classmates, family, or neighbors.
In addition to Teachers, television 📺 also provided supplemental vocabulary.
You happen to hark from? What sort of English is that?
It’s posh lol they’re lying about not being posh. Next thing they’ll be saying tally ho old chap.
It’s interesting compared to the US where the younger generation has largely been losing its regional accents and speaking a more general accent. This is most notable in areas that are famous for their strong accents like Brooklyn, New York. If you take a young Brooklyn native today and compared them to old Brooklyn native like Bernie Sanders and you can easily tell the difference.
Yes, I think it's scary how fast American regional accents are dissappearing.
Don't be fooled. The youth in the UK all talk like wannabe London 'roadmen' these days. I don't speak the dialect of the place I grew up, which has all but disappeared in this day and age - I remember the way that old people spoke when I was a kid, and almost nobody speaks that way now. All regional accents are disappearing gradually. All accents evolve over time, and the more connected we are, the more they merge together.
I'm certain that higher mobility in upper middle class also plays a part--my parents have different US regional accents and I'm told that mine is neutral half of the time and borrows vowels weirdly the other half.
@@avalondreaming1433 Is "scary" a typo for "wonderful"? That we can all understand each other and don't grow up subject to prejudice?
@@ssl3546 One person's prejudice is another's lyricism, character, heritage, etc. 'Scary' is overstated, but I personally would hate it if everyone spoke 'Vanilla.' Or worse still A.I., Siri, Alexa. Not 'wonderful'!
when I first moved to the UK, I was very confused by the term 'public school'. Where I'm from it means state owned school where normal/poor people go, schools like Eton in my country would be called private school.
You're Canadian?
same here, I can't get my head around the UK's public school term because it's used for the opposite where I live
@@BenefitCounterbench because public schools were originally for clever kids from the working class sponsored by the crown
@@BenefitCounterbench They were called public schools because they were the first schools open to the public, ie, anyone who could afford to attend could go. 'Private' schools were those in royal palaces, monasteries etc where there were strict restrictions on who could attend, ie those in holy orders or members of royal households.
TY to Oliver and Londonfogey, I always wondered about that.
I like how your cousin keeps his social distance.
ha ha. I insisted
😂😂😂
@@LetThemTalkTV And he en-Siss-Ted
Ur name is too hard man😎
😂😂😂😂😂
Very interesting video which made me reflect on my own pronunciation and accent which is very RP. I was born in Glasgow, both my parents had very modified Glaswegian accents having lived in England for years. When I was about three years old we relocated to south London and when I was 11 we moved to Cambridge. We were a working class family, my dad was a welder and my mum was a dinner lady for school meals. At school, I was often bullied for talking posh, the other kids mistook my RP for posh. Given my background I just wonder how I became an RP speaker. I am not complaining, I have been an English language teacher for more than 30 years and the one consistent piece of feedback I get from students is that I am easy to understand!
From the American Heritage Dictionary: Usage Note: The pronunciation of often with a (t) is a classic example of what is known as a spelling pronunciation. During the 1500s and 1600s, English experienced a widespread loss of certain consonant sounds within consonant clusters, as the (d) in handsome and handkerchief, the (p) in consumption and raspberry, and the (t) in chestnut and often. In this way the consonant clusters were simplified and made easier to articulate. But with the rise of public education and literacy in the 1800s, people became more aware of spelling, and sounds that had become silent were sometimes restored. This is the case with the (t) in often, which is acceptably pronounced with or without the (t). In similar words, such as soften and listen, the t has generally remained silent.
I'm just some guy from Ohio, but I have always pronounced 'often' as OFF-ten. I have never once been 'corrected.'
I've always pronounced the 't' in often as well lol
@@apriljasso9731 I think the pronunciation is similar to orphan, when said correctly
@De NAZI? there's a lot of Americans in the world.
In the late '50's, our "Language" textbooks taught us to not pronounce the "t" in "often" because it was silent. They said that was incorrect and to not pronounce it. In later years, I was surprised to learn that it actually could be correctly used.
@@kayclapp8639 I've been pronouncing the words in this video so frequently that I now think they all sound daft (darft). But , one thing I always do, is say often with a t.
Most Americans don't pronounce "often" as "affen," and some pronounce the "t," it's really a personal choice with us. This is especially true in urban coastal areas.
No it’s regional, northeast southeast Deep South west, low, middle and upperclass lot of differences in annunciation, pronunciation and accents. Most Brits think all Americans speak the same way and have the same accents.
Bless his heart for trying to sound American. And yeah, I switch between saying the T and not.
Not true. I'm from the west and never heard the T pronounced until I was an adult and mixed with people who had moved west from somewhere else.
@@FigaroHey pronouncing the T is very southern
@@FigaroHey I'm from the west and I can guarantee we would make fun of you for not pronouncing the t in often
My maternal aunts & grandparents left England for Australia in 1968… they only spoke perfect RP & one of my aunts still does. For years I thought that was just proper English… only recently did it dawn on me that very few people in the UK today still speak that way, and my relatives probably do so because they left the UK in the ‘60’s so they missed the linguistic shift back to regional dialects that’s happened since then.
Most accents used in England today have been around well before 1960s
I wanted this video for like 2 years Thank you so much for this video. You are a great teacher and I love your lesson by the way.
I made it for you.
@@LetThemTalkTV I made this reply for you. Let's run off to Yerp and leave it all behind.
@@moaningpheromones 🤣
*Margaret Thatcher took lessons to move from her Lincolnshire accent to sounding like the Duchess of Devonshire. And the former England captain, David Beckham, who used to speak cockney is trying to speak with an RP accent these days!*
Loool what a snob
@@linsayross278 David Beckham had voice coaching because he has quite a high natural voice and it was affecting his confidence.
My cousin (another cousin) checked him in for his flight at Heathrow. Till today she won't stop saying how common he sounds
@@auracle6184 His voice coaching is one thing, and his poshification is another thing. It's no secret that David Beckham has lately been poshing up his accent.
Auracle I do know what his voice was like ffs. One doesn’t need RP English to sound like ones balls have dropped
They once did a survey in Poland about the Polish language. And they found that the language that is most standard and conforming to the norms is the one spoken in Szczecin and Wrocław. Two biggest cities gained by Poland after IIWW, where most of the citizens are descended from people recently resettled from other areas. This shows, that similar to the RP, the “standard” way of speaking is often one that nobody speaks locally, but will be used as a “neutral” way to communicate by people from different backgrounds.
It is very common for people who want to get involved with Radio or Television in the USA to move to New Mexico, namely Albuquerque, where a large majority of the population speak with a pretty near flawless Standard American English accent. It’s really weird for me as a person growing up there, I remember one of the first times I saw the news in another region, and I was perplexed why they were not speaking in the local accent, like we did in New Mexico.
Then, I picked up German, and as a foreign fluent speaker, I of course sound German but not _from_ anywhere in Germany.
The same goes for the Czech Republic. The most standard language is the language of the former Sudetenland, where the German population was expulsed from.
I like Poland! 🤍❤
Uczę się języka polskiego! Kiedyś będę odwiedzić Polskę. 🇵🇱🇵🇱
There's a whole running bit in The Pirates of Penzance that plays on confusion between "often" and "orphan."
Can you give me a link for that moment, I'm writing diploma about English accents in movies)
@@Natalia-tq6wv I'm not sure if that counts as a movie, since it's actually an American production of an operetta that first premiered in 1879.
The only proper Brit in the cast is Angela Lansbury as Ruth.
If you want the movie version, that's actually on UA-cam. But there are also many other performances in UA-cam , many by English companies.
@@BethDiane can you, please, write me full name of your it? Maybe you know another movie with English accents or dialects, like Ireland or Scottish?
@@Natalia-tq6wv I'm American, so I don't know a lot, but I'd look for any movie featuring Jack Buchanan or George Formby, who had the additional benefit of having slid a lot past the censors.
@@BethDiane thank you a lot, I'll check
I just watched "My Fair Lady" with my daughter and this is such an interesting background information--it really explains the exposition of the story--why Professor Higgins studied the English regional dialects, and why Eliza sought out Higgins to take elocution lessons. Thank you!
She wanted to work in an 'at shop where it was warm and dry indoors rather than a flower stall in English weather as I recall. That might be more Pygmalion than MFL but the idea is the same - she wanted to better herself.
I thought Higgins sought out Doolittle, to settle a bet with his colleague.
@@GeeTrieste That was Pygmalion. MFL took a lot of liberties.
MFL does explicitly tell Eliza's motivation is to learn to speak properly so she can get a job at a flower shop. With her thick accent, she'd be stuck as a flower girl in the streets.
A fun linguistic detail suited for this video's theme is the conclusion of the bet where Higgins' rival determines that Eliza's English is too perfect for her to be English, so he guesses she's Hungarian.
@@mikegalvin9801 Mr 'iggins! 😅
My sister lived in Ireland for a decade and then in England. After a time, the Irish almost always took her for English and the English thought that she was Irish. In fact she was an American, who, in her early twenties, spoke with a very noticeable Texas "twang".
Omg, for the life of me I can't figure out if I pronounce the 't' in often or not. I've been saying it both ways for the last 5 minutes, and they both sound weird to me now.
it's contagious
same here
Same, I realized I say both depending on if I’m emphasizing anything
Same!!
Sorry, if find ofTen to sound irritating. Indexes irritating. Indices sounds much better. Most financial writers seem to have forgotten that. Henry Higgins was right. REx Harrison good example of elegant English pronunciation
It would’ve been great to let us hear RP vs Posh at the beginning of the video.
In Norway we were first taught "proper" English in elementary school, but then somewhere around grade 7 we started to switch to a more "general American" English.
Though a trick some kids did use was to speak with an overly posh English accent and it usually gave them better grades lol.
I still find myself randomly using colour and armour for some reason
While American English is more common orally in Norwegian classes and society due to media influence, British English is what's officially being taught in Norwegian schools. I also use "ou" rather than "o" in those cases, because that's what we were being taught, and it's better to be consistent rather than to switch between the two.
I know a guy who is born and raised Dutch who speaks with a strong East-Texas accent and he's never been to the US lol
Please don't call British English "proper" as opposed to American English. Both dialects are equally valid forks of the English that was spoken when the British colonized America. The two branches evolved over time as every language does. In fact, linguists say American English has stayed closer to the English spoken back then, while British English has changed more.
@@goombapizza6335 No, it's not.
Well, that's how you spell colour and armour . .
👍 👍
Very interesting, the same happens with Italian language: if you listen to TV or Radio the speakers use quite often a kind of pronunciation you'd hear in Rome or central Italy as well but if you talk to people there are huge differences between different regions
Alessandro Visigalli Or Switzerland where people know their local dialect, a regional language, and the national language. Particularly where mountains have isolated people from a lot of outsiders, new dialects have emerged even short distances apart. Germany taught High German as a unifier across dialects. France is also very particular about their unifier. As the US media was not state run, there was never a central idea that dictated how people should talk or act. Local newspapers and then broadcasts tended to sound and look local, UNLESS someone had aspirations to rise to national stardom and then they tried to emulate their idols. Eventually diversity was more prized than uniformity. It was predicted Americans would sound the same by now but we are more diverse than ever, with rules being broken with impunity.
Same thing with spanish un Argentina......
Same in Spain, lots of accents but on TV you'll mostly hear central accent
Do not try to read this comment out-loud, your lungs will not thank you.
Lol.. this is the case with almost all languages. At least the European ones..
I’ve also noticed this. I’m from South Wales (and sometimes you can hear it!) but because I had severe speech impediments when I was a kid I was ‘trained’ to speak in RP. Years later at Oxford I very quickly recognised the difference between the majority of people (who spoke with either clear regional or international accents), the minority of people who spoke in something approximating RP (maybe they were just from the right social strata in England or went to a British International school), and the tiny minority who were just straight-up posh
I do speak RP as well. I'm from Germany, so that falls perfectly into your category of being educated outside the UK. When I talk to people in the UK they oftentimes are not able to tell where I am from, and are very astonished to hear that I'm a German.
I mean, the Queen is about a century old so can't complain 😂
Anagha Shyam haha, yes exactly! That makes perfect sense 👌
The Queen has actually changed her accent over the course of her reign. Go listen to some of her speeches in the 1950s and compare it to how she spoke in the last part of the 20th century (before her voice became 'old lady")
No she’s a thousand
She will outlive us all.
🤣👸
I like your ‘ better educated’ cousin, Tarquin’s upper class, posh accent! 😂😁😀👍 You’re a good entertainer as well. Thanks.🌸👏🌹
I once met a guy at an amusement park who was visiting the US from Wales. It was the most awkward language barrier I've ever experienced. I could tell he was speaking English by picking out words here and there but mostly sounded like jibberish. To this day, I'm still haunted by the idea that I probably answered simple questions like "what's your name?" Or "where are you from?" incorrectly.
I was in Edinburgh when I was 18. I am American. I was trying to ask for directions, and people very kindly explained things to me, but I couldn’t understand one word that they said. Then I met this guy who was born and raised in Edinburgh, and we went to get a drink. I think he had a hard time understanding me, and I had a hard time understanding him. I was really surprised.
@@dazzlingdeb8427 I've explained this to friends before but they don't understand why it's so hard. You have to experience it first hand I guess lol
As a Canadian trying to understand different accents from the different contries it is not only words themselves which may be harder to understand but the many unique idioms and nicknames. These are so numerous and quite baffling.
I love a Welsh accent though
The Welsh accent varies from the North to the South. Maybe he was from the North.
Really confused by the use of "east midlands" to mean regions around Oxford & Cambridge. I have always used it to refer to Leicester, Nottingham, Derby etc.
That's because Oxford, Cambridge and that aren't in the current region of the East Midlands - they're in the South. They were in the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, which ecompased the current day West and East Midlands as well as a bit of the South, but yeah. East Mids is most definitely Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Lincoln, Rutland, with Northampton at the bottom (speaking as someone from just south of Nottingham)
Very interesting and very informative. Many thanks. I'm now know that I am very old fashioned and understand that I am part of the less than 3%!! Good grief! By the way, POSH comes from the old 1930's on those lovely cruise liners when the higher classes were always given cabins on the cooler side of the ship so as not to obtain the afternoon heat, so it was always Port Out, Starboard Home. It is said that POSH was stamped on the tickets.
Er. that's fewer than 3% if you don't mind.
@@rogerturner5504 Fewer is for countable things; less than is for things that are measured. If "fewer than" was used with 3% would imply that one could count all the amounts of percent that were "fewer than 3%". For example 0%, 1%, 2%. In fact there are uncountably infinite (using these terms as used in maths) amounts of percent between 0% and 3%. Some examples are: 0.5%, 1.6%, 2.2567898765% and uncountable infinite more. So percent is a measurement, and "less than 3%" is the correct usage.
@@franksierow5792 Apologies - you are correct. Like the man with the built-up shoe, I stand corrected.
"POSH"!, freaking, stAmped, on their tickets
LMAO
Very interesting !
For me as a german this is quite interesting because we don't have accents according to social class per se. Accents are mainly a regional thing, but having no accent whatsoever is common in general. I'm from bavaria where people if speaking a dialect usually have a pretty strong one, but about 90% of us either don't use it or aren't even able to use it because we're not used to it. Of course the places we are from reflect in some pronunciations of words, but it's pretty hard to differentiate because it's fairly subtle. However there are many people who speak german with arabic or turkish influences and those are really easy to tell apart from 'normal german', since not only words tend to be used differently, but also their pronunciation of combinations like 'ch' is different. But we don't have such grave differences in language as british english for example does
I had a dear friend, now long deceased, who was the daughter of a school-master in Thuringer Wald. To my astonishment, she had great contempt for all things Bavarian, an attitude I found unnecessary for someone of her intelligence and bearing, and thus downright amusing.
@@waltperry5781 yeah that's probably down to georgraphic reasons because my father is from Coburg, a town in northern bavaria that couldn't be closer to Thüringen (the region/state just north of bavaria), and there everyone despises Thüringen and its people. That's just a rivalry thing that children are taught to remain the culture. I'm sorry for your loss though. She seemed to be quite an entertaining person
As an English speaker attempting to learn German, I would expect my pronunciation of the language is abhorrent, however I like to believe that I'm improving. 😅
There is also much less differentiation of "posh"/"common" in France, too. Regional and educational-level differences yes, but not so much class difference.
I find it interesting that German doesn’t have an upper class accent. In the UK the upper class always wanted to be seen as above the middle class commoners and one of the ways they did this was by using a different accent that they decided sounded more higher class and fancy. Someone from the upper class to know they’re from the upper class so they would do anything they could do differentiate themselves from the common people. They wouldn’t want to be misidentified as someone from the dirty working class.
Thank you for telling us how the "a" in English is all about. I was taught abroad and the teacher always taught us to pronounce the "a" as somewhere between [a:] and [e]. When I say the word "apple" to people in Liverpool, they pretended they did not understand what I was trying to buy. I had no idea either it was in fact I pronounced the word "apple" incorrectly all my life, or they just purely did not understand me. Anyway I adapted my pronunciation to [a:]pple instead, in fact I now pronounce all letter A as in [a:] after. Now I know it is just another way to pronounce it in Britain, and I did not pronounce it wrong initially.
Are you talking about [æ] sound?
So you're saying that Freddie Mercury speaks the "posh rp" like the Queen? Talk about dedication to your career, am I right?
@Novak Ingood that's why I put it in quotes cos I didn't know what to call it
Novak Ingood I think that’s the point. It’s “old fashioned” because not many people speak that way. He grew up in Zanzibar/India in the 50s/60s and schools would have taught that way.
@Novak Ingood Freddie's English has a slight Indian gemination.
@ThisIsMyRealName I think you're confusing the Queen with Winston Churchill
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 It was a joke, dear pedants.
Excellent video. I remember when I was in York in the 80's as a teenager, just having learnt basic English at school in Poland, I went to a little shop to buy a pack of matches. I said "mætʃəs pliːs", or "mɛtʃəs pliːs". The seller widened his eyes and started to mock me for a couple of minutes, pretending not to understand even when I showed with my hands what I was after. He even asked if I wanted maps. :D After the grilling, when I was just about to give up, he suddenly said "Aha! Mɑːtʃiːz!", pronouncing the vowels for, like, 3 seconds. This was the first time I understood there was no kidding with British accents.
So, the Crawley's from Downton Abbey had a posh accent, and that's why it was so difficult for me to understand them at first. I didn't know if it was a regional thing or what (hard to explain, because their house staff didn't speak like that).
This is very interesting, thank you!
Just out of curiosity, where are you from?
@@kathleenhurst3590 I'm from Uruguay, South America.
The house staff spoke with a lower working class accent in Downton Abbey.
That's funny because as an American I understood the Crawleys perfectly.
The Crawleys were of course actors who had varying approximations of an old school posh accent. To my ear Edith sounded the most "posh", and Lord Grantham sounded much less so. Mary also sounded quite posh.
Can you explain why recent generations in the US have embraced the standard non-regional accent while the UK has seemingly moved in the opposite direction? Does it have anything to do with urbanization patterns?
Some accents in the US are actually getting stronger, like the inland north accent around the great lakes.
@@joelp5093 The Great Vowel Shift is the worst thing I have ever heard! People pronouncing "Max" as "MAY-x" sounds absolutely horrible!
@@masoncrowley2777 It’s an abrasive accent for sure, but nowhere nearly as bad as the Long Island accent, another regional American dialect still going strong.
I though that I spoke standard non-regional American English until I arrived at a university in Indiana and learned that my accent is Californian, and, of course, California is huge, so there are regional subdivisions of Californian English.
I actually think you have a considerably stronger regional accent then you assess yourself to have, it stands out fairly strongly to me and is very distinctive, particularly when you compare it to someone like Freddie Mercury. If it was a scale from 'pure Scouse' serving as our 100 point for the strongest regional accent (perhaps some Scottish accents are stronger but they get quite dialect-y when they get very strong) and Freddie as say 10 for near pure RP I would place you probably about 40 or 50
Lots of fs not ths, sounds really southern to me. But then I am from the civilised north.
@@paulshuttleworth6261 I agree, I Felt the speaker had little hint of RP. I thought he sounded like alot of London Taxi drivers
I think he has a strong London accent. Reminds me a little of Jonny Lee Miller when he’s speaking naturally.
It’s a north London accent, got a distinctive north London nasal twang
I knew he was from London straightaway because of how he said London 😂 I would suggest this is a Grammar School London accent like Roger Daltry and Alan Johnson.
When I was teaching ELS in Korea I had a lot of students who had lived for years in the UK and it was cook to hear that RP coming out of their mouths. "Teacher, I need the dictionary. That enormous one." "It's not a flashlight -- it's a *torch*!" Another kid had the RP accent but made standard Korean grammar and syntax errors which made her particularly charming.
Would you mind providing some examples of RP with standard Korean grammar and syntax errors? Sounds intriguing!
Alongside the genuine question, that was my best attempt at RP)
@@DjurslandsEfterskole I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I just remember the feeling I'd get hearing Wendy make the same grammar and syntax mistakes as her classmates but doing it with that flawless accent.
So interesting! I learnt an awesome mixture of R.P. and Posh-accent in school in Austria during the seventies. I didn’t know and didn’t think about. In the States they realized that but thought it to be normal as I’m from Europe.
Nowadays an American pronunciation is far more common at school, also in Austria.
I really enjoy watching your videos on different accents and their history. Thanks a lot to you and the algorithm which has suggested your videos to me.
Interesting to hear about the shift from RP to regional accents, as I just got turned away from a job interview and told my accent was "unprofessional". I have an Edinburgh accent - considered one of the poshest Scottish accents. Regardless, I was shocked that they would even consider a person's accent in employment. I wouldn't have had any issues being turned away (I'm sure there were other reasons) but the fact they had the fucking nerve to comment on my accent?!?! Jesus, I feel like I dodged a bullet there
Damn, even the most posh Scottish accent is still seen as "uncivilized" to the British. Now if that isn't discrimination, I don't know what is.
Scotland is part of Britain. I think you are trying to refer to England. @@ToaOfFusion
@@clairemcconway6266 Nah, we just refer to England as part of the Brits, therefore it's British. Also it sounds confusing when you use English in its place because folks are going to be confused if you are referring to the language or the specific dialect of the *English* language
Ah, but what sort of Edinburgh accent do you have? The Morningside "Miss Jean Brodie" one where a creche is a collision between two motor vehicles? (does anyone under 50 still speak like that, by the way?). Or the rather less-posh variants? I had a cousin who lived her entire life just off Easter Road and another from Trinity who sounded quite different from each other. (I should say that although I was a student for 5 years in Edinburgh in the 1980s, I never quite got familiar enough with the various Edinburgh accents to pinpoint them accurately).
@@ToaOfFusion hey, I consider myself British as my mother is Welsh. We obviously have very different views on what Britain is, but I think you're really writing off a whole group of people with such a blanket statement as Britain = England. I struggled with my national identity growing up so having that catchall "I'm British" was really helpful. Sorry if this comes off as rude, I just want to present a different side of the argument to you :)
Wow, that was soooo good. I am absolutely happy i have come across this fascinating channel. Thank you!
When I was growing up probably more than 66% of my locality spoke a form of RP. From elocution perfect to a watered down version. Quite regularly I'd get an impromptu lesson from my late mother: "S-o-u-n-d your words!" and "The Rain in Spain etc etc".
Very true. I grew up in Zimbabwe and in primary school, elocution was scored as part of our reading exercises.
He who uses the word "posh" may be many things, but posh he is not.
Just use "high brow" instead of "posh" and you am become posh
@@tedarcher9120 The problem with that is that most "posh" people are anything but high brow.
You can be common as muck and still be high brow.
Victoria Beckham's nickname is Posh Spice.
I read that that 'posh' people- who are too posh to use the word- use the word 'smart' instead.
Was posh spice actually posh?
And here i am, with my "i learned english by reading books and i can't pronounce some sounds and also my mothertounge is interferring a lot"-accent. I'm surprised, that people understand me.
SuperSkyhorse Ever read Tarzan books? Even being raised by apes, he learned English with a posh accent from reading books. (He was born an aristocrat so spoke it naturally??) :D Luckily for you, there is a ton online and in recorded books. I can understand most British and their former colonies' accents because of that. For me, the hardest accent is Northern Ireland, in the comedy news show on BBC Radio Ulster/internet The Hole in the Wall Gang. Talk slowly, use gestures, write it down if need be...we'll figure out what you mean.
Loving it!
English is really forgiving when it comes to pronunciation i feel.
Oh my gosh!!!! Thanks for everything you've been doing for us my amazing teacher!!!! Keep up the good work!!!!
I'm studying Linguistics and English Literature, and the accent we are learning is English RP. This year is my third year of career, and we have always spoken about this matter, but didn't understand fully because as you said, and what my faculty explained to me, it can be confused with posh English. Indeed, until I saw your video I always thought RP accent was posh English, because the BBC and polititians. But I'm glad to see it is not that exactly. Although, I can see with more clarity why this accent has so many discusses in my university: “we sound so British that no one will believe we are British at all.”
Posh people pronounce ‘valet’ with the T! Or more likely manservant! ‘When there is a good English word we use it. Not the French word.’ My English grandmother used say. Hence napkin not serviette.
I think it’s pretty divided. I’ve heard old rich pronounce it both ways, but yeah I’m sure there was a certain kind of nationalism about not pronouncing the T
I was wondering about that....
Manservant still has servant which is French lol
Øroiq old french, via the Norman Conquest. Not a loan word
Øroiq I think they pronounced their Ts back then. I don’t know
My grandfather spoke Queen's English. Not RP, actual Queen's. I loved listening to him tell stories because he sounded so overly posh and I always felt like I was taken back to the 1920's. Meanwhile I speak pure RP as I grew up in the South East. I pronounce my T's, I say months not mumfs, etc. :)
When I was going to go into acting (U.S.), we were taught R.P. as a base before trying to tackle regional U.K. accents!
I live in the UK. Sometimes I in American dramas there is a character that sounds very odd to me, and then I realise that they are supposed to have a British English accent. The various American accents just sound normal to me. I would probably not notice if the British character just had an American accent. Maybe what I am hearing with the supposed British accent is just someone struggling or feeling awkward.
So that's the accent Monty Python were attempting in the Upperclass Twits sketch.
webbess1 errrrogenous zooooone!
I love you
They likely were/are fluent in Posh, since they're Oxbridge+Ivy educated.
we call those Russel Group
@@Artorus John Cleese for sure. His natural accent is quite upper class bordering on posh.n
The Queen's English means something much more archaic over here in the US. I'm trying to learn more about the peculiarities of British English from your videos. It is fascinating to also hear the similarities that persist in the English of my native central Appalachia where West Virginia, east Kentucky and SE Ohio come together.
Shouldn't we expect the Queen's pronunciation to be somewhat old-fashioned, since she was born in the 1920s?
Actually, there is evidence that the Queen's pronunciation has changed over time
The Queens accent has definitely changed. And younger members of the Royal Family tend to speak with a more RP accent. Prince William sounds less posh than Boris Johnson, for example.
@@ffotograffydd Boris Johnson doesn't sound posh, he's in the nuevo riche boorish group
If you say so.
@@em3000 Boris Johnson’s accent is perhaps a little put-on (read: not toned-down like most of his Elton contemporaries) but is certainly genuine. He comes from a family that is certainly not nouveau-riche.
position as a
This is a real good content! As a linguist I just loved it, also information is reliable :)!
Thank you very much for a well-made and interesting video. I have always felt it exactly how you defined it: It is not about class or region. Just as loving opera doesn't mean upper class as some think, but love of art music and drama.
Now I know why a friend said I spoke better English than they did (West Midlands) and why a stranger in London said I was "middle class". My English teacher in the Waldorf school spoke beautiful RP. I remember wondering why my class-mates didn't much, as I lived there as an "exchange student".
I also get why the audience laughs so when Mr Bean says "Hwhat and other Queen's English speech. the fun in it for a foreigner is the exaggeration, whereas we think the accent to be perfectly normal.
Most English accents (from the UK), in my experience, are more difficult for non-native speakers to learn than “standard American”. We technically learned RP in my school, but as we got older, almost everyone moved over to speaking with a “standard” American accent. Later on, we were also given a choice to use American or UK spelling, as long as we were consistent in our writing, and not mixing the two.
I’m not sure how to explain it, other than American being more “flat” somehow. It’s just easier to “fit” in the mouth. 😅
Well the standard North American accent is more like earlier English; it dates to before the Hanovers re-injected England with German pronunciation and got the upper classes to sound like they filled their mouths with marbles.
Most people would choose the American spelling, because it contains fewer letters lol . I'm American, (yet an Anglophile) & I began writing the British way - in middle school (thank you Agatha Christie!) & I was made fun of by my peers & deemed a "snob" & "pseudo-intellectual".... to each their own! My *favourite* *colour* is *grey* !! 😏😉
@@normalabbie It felt so weird when I first started seeing 'color' and 'favorite' because I have used 'colour' and 'favourite' my whole life. But now I end up mixing words like 'traveling' and 'travelling'. The line is getting more and more blur until I won't be able to differentiate between them anymore.
@@normalabbie American Spelling is terrible.
@@o0...957 possibly because MS word often makes, for example, Australian spelling the same as American spelling , which is crap. I put my setting to English from UK. Also twitter and we based emails often has the incorrect American spelling in it. It is a forced acceptance of American spelling , like a disease, infecting the world.
I grew up in the middle of North Carolina (US) and a lot the pronunciations of British words remind me of the country folks back home. Probably because we descend from British Colonists. I've even had people mistake my Southern accent for a British accent. Especially when I was a beginner at annunciating around non-Southerners. It orften came across as British.😄
I agree completely with your characterization of the Piedmont NC accent. It was pointed out to me when I first moved to London to work. And SC low country sounds a bit like certain Scots accents
What a delight to find your channel “old bean.” Being from America’s northern midwest (Ohio) I feel I have the least recognizable ( or most benign) regional accent of all. So I do spend too much time trying to adopt the accents I hear from British TV series. Don’t judge me. I just want to sound important.😊 Thanks for your highly informative videos. Learning about the posh accent explains much.
Important from within not from one's accent. Work on your self-esteem.
It is common for just about everyone to think of their native accent as being the most "benign". If you were to go to New York or Boston, for example, they'd likely peg you as Midwestern pretty quickly. Our own accent always sounds the most "normal" to our own ear.
@@itoo3654 you posted a lot of comments. you should collate them and start at a fortune cookie industry.
A slight correction: Harry, Prince William, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and the other younger royals use RP, whereas the Queen, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne use "posh English".
Why half of the Queen's children use RP is a mystery.
It's to do with when they went to school, Charles is over a decade older than Andrew.
It isn't a mystery at all. It makes you look like a right all douche bag.
Anne spent more time at home being home schooled with her parents than her brothers. Their accent may be more like their schools.
@alicia baldwin Accent of cohorts.
I always thought it was a conscious decision to make them seem more accessible/less stuffy.
The r pronounced in "better (r)every day" wouldn't be intrusive, just linking. An intrusive r is one that's inserted when it's not in the spelling, like "China (r)and Japan".
Ken Hudson Pittsburgh and Baltimore, at least, are parts of America that say warsh.
@Ken Hudson I live in Washington. It used to be relative common among native Washingtonians who were somewhat poorer than average. This has changed a lot over the last 60 years. Now I seldom hear it from anyone younger than 55.
an idea(r) of ... law(r) and order ... draw(r)ing ... contra(r)indication
Is this actually a thing? Never lived in an English-speaking country, but I've spoken English since I was a child and I don't think I've ever heard the intrusive r...
@@asqures5541 Well, it's only a thing in non-rhotic accents
It was an eye-opener when I helped a Chinese colleague transcribe interviews recorded with otherwise well-spoken suburban native students and realise that even I sometimes had difficulty.
I appreciate having been exposed to BBC radio in my childhood, but am happy to have added some of the characteristics of my West Country home. (Though I was teased and nicknamed "Bamber" (Gascoigne) when I first left school and did manual work.)
Part of my eagerness to retire to France is to see what sort of French accent I naturally acquire ...
I'm no expert, but I find in places like Jersey some words have survived from the French, but the pronunciation doesn't sound like modern French. Your accent in France will depend on who you learn it from and what region you move to. It can be difficult to learn to speak French or Spanish without an "English" accent, but with work it can be done.
What would be the correct or better, the most used pronunciation of "schedule" in British English? I've heard at least 3 different ways.
S(k)edule?
ˈʃɛdjuːl
Sked yool.
Though I've heard shed yool a lot.
In UK it’s ‘soft’ as in shhhhh. US speakers generally pronounce these types of words more phonetically - like lieutenant.
My dad insisted I pronounce it as if the 'c' wasn't there: shed-yule. But 'sked' is very widespread too. 'shed' sounds posher to me - whether that is the same thing as correct is a matter of opinion....
I would totally listen to a 12 hours long video about English accents. 😍
Love this - great vlog as always! BBC Worldwide TV news had a presenter with a dense Scots accent, fascinating descant to others' RP.
Awesome class, I love when you mix English and a bit of history and how things happened as time passes... thanks very very much 🙏🏻😘
Amazing as usual! I'm Russian, I'm a teacher and I do care about pronunciation. Thank you so much!
I was born in West Yorkshire as the son of a co-op grocery van driver. Our neighbours included peg-legs from the 1st war, and they spoke 'broad Yorkshire' which I understand perfectly but don't use (much), unless I am in Yorkshire and drunk. My career took me to European Group Finance Director for 28 companies..so I might have had to go to London every month and invest 100 million in a pension fund and mix with top end Londoners. When I (early) retired 19 years ago, I moved to the US. My wife is from Milwaukee. I considered my accent sophisticated neutral RP. I went to Home Depot in Menomonee Falls WI, and the cashier said "You are from Yorkshire". I was discovered and I was shocked ! He said "I used to share an apartment with a guy from Yorkshire"....
Do not cite the deep Fowler magic to me
I was there when it was written.
- Her Majesty The Queen
i think she was even born in 1926
@@dianamagritte she was!
For all the oiks that were wondering, a 'postillion' or 'postilion' is a term used for the driver on the left hand side of a horse-drawn carriage.
I thought that the postillion was the servant who rode on the step on the back so that when you stopped you had a servant to help you out of the carriage (thus having one on a motor car was rare in the 1900s and gone by the start of WWI, except for the formal coaches used by the Queen going to Parliament or Westminster).
man - youtube knows everything. so cool.
They often get struck by lightning...
The Postilions are the riders of the horses pulling a carriage.
That image, I don't know why, is what I would think of when I hear "enemy"
My Dad grew up in Gloucester, and due to his undiagnosed dyslexia was streamed into trades after failing various levels. At 81 he’s an incredibly skilled joiner. We live in Canada; my departed Mum was born in Churchdown and went to Pates School for Girls in Cheltenham. Both of my parents spoke in RP, though sometimes would slip into a posh accent to put on airs lol but they never really took on the regional Canadian accent of southwestern Ontario. And while it wasn’t their usual way of speaking, I also got to know the West Country accent that my aunt and uncle back home spoke with.
3%! 😵
As a child I began trying to alter my heavy Australian accent to sound like what I now know is RP. I still sound Australian, I just try hard to be as eloquent as possible within our dialect.
After a lifetime of coaching myself to speak 'correctly' you can my imagine my absolute shock horror in the 00's when English migration to Aus hit overdrive and all these strange unintelligible accents started popping up!
There's nothing funnier than someone from the North of England asking you where in England you originally came from and not being able to understand what they are saying through their thick muddled accents 😂
I love your story !
I have spent months studying studying Spanish online and found a fantastic resource at Fergs spanish blueprint (google it if you're interested)
Aussie accent is so good! I love it! But I can feel it for you! I was surprised to learn from a londoner that so many young people in London are trying not to speak proper English. That's a pity...
@@jajangmyeon7951 well, don't worry. I am sure many people will admire your English. My assumption is that young people express their protest with skewed English, sort of, the opposite to the "high class". I guess the idea of layering the society into classes is something youngsters are trying to get away from. However, I've never lived in London, so for me, it is hard to reason about the root causes. But I am definitely sure that such trends exist, google "norf london", for example :)
I used to live with a Poshtralian in London.
Great lesson,as always dear Gideon!Thanks so much for your commendable efforts!😍🍓🍓🍓
My pleasure
The London regional accent has gained ground during my lifetime, displacing local dialects in the neighbouring counties. I am very sad that Sussex dialect has largely died out. I always wanted to speak with an educated Sussex accent, but in trying to avoid "estuary English" I have largely lost my local sound. Except, that is, if I find myself in a pub where local dialect is spoken, when I quickly fall into the old ways.
Hahaha the skit was so funny I loved it😂 Also I'm not a native English speaker and my pronunciation is very close to RP it's just so fascinating to me that we all learn RP but in fact very few natives actually speak it.
Why does the RP sound like us Americans pretending to speak with a "fancy British accent".
Hmmm that's more what the Transatlantic accent sounds like really lol.
@desertrosereads WAS the standard accent of the BBC - less so nowadays. It is also true to say that in my lifetime (over 65 years) that accent has changed considerably, as, indeed, has the Queen's. I do have to say that when I hear a 'British' accent on American tv shows, it invariably sounds false, or 'too good to be true' to my ears, unless spoken by a British person, who may have learnt the accent at RADA (acting school), but is able to use it as their own. I am often suprised by the number of Australian actors that effect a 'British' accent in these roles as well, as though either American TV doesn't think brits can do such an accent, or maybe they just can't afford us! Who knows....
Honestly, Posh sounds more like the faux English accents by Americans than the RP to me... 😳
@@Yiran not literally never, Ethan. A rarity in our community, but not 'never'. I have a friend who speaks RP. Born in Hull (north of England), raised in the Midlands - he never did explain to me how he gained his affected accent, but he sticks out a mile as soon as he opens his mouth.
@@rawkhawk414 Surely not...
Your videos are really profound sir. A huge salute and gratitude from a Bangladeshi English learner.
That was so much fun! I never quite understood the "source" of RP, nor what made something posh. I am from the U.S. I absolutely love it that Freddie Mercury spoke RP--and so does Richard E. Grant.
You sound more “London” than “neutral” RP to my ear. I lived in Hertfordshire and Berkshire for ~10 years and knew a bunch of people who went to boarding school (not Eton) and they had a very proper BBC RP type accent, not posh but more enunciated and less nasal than how you speak. (I have a middle class East Coast US accent so the result of that with 10 years soaking in British accents was... an accent completely indistinguishable from a common accent from Toronto, Canada. Go figure.)
My first language is Russian and the first British I was immersed in was when I did my A-levels at a public school in Hertfordshire. It was honestly the best thing that happened for my accent, those kids speak like most strive to. Hertfordshire accent is beautiful.
Yes, he does not speak with an RP to my ear.
Yeah when he said he speaks with an RP accent, I was like, "Umm, no..." lol
The presenter's accent sounds like a 50/50 hybrid of RP and East London.
@@SoopahG it's a bit estuary English but very clear. He says that about 2 minutes in himself
From Brazil, i enjoy your classes so much. I’m obliged (obrigada).
The best example of often pronunciation is the play on often and orphan in the Pirates of Penzance.
Boy... when i went to the uk a lot of people thought we were upper class, because of the english we had learned at school...
and you are from the north pole ?
A classmate and I were so fed up with RP at school that we randomly switched to Americanized English, even during oral exams, and the teachers had to cut us off. Imagine a teacher speaking _so_ RP that her "I think" sounds like "I sink"... It was hilarious.
@@BenefitCounterbench Literally 99% of all English teachers anywhere in the former Soviet Union))
@@MM-hd6xo true, I also live in a post-communist country so that fits
@@BenefitCounterbench hey, you're my favourite actor!
I speak RP. I went to a State school and didn’t go to university until I was 30. I was born in the Derby and whilst it is in the East Midlands, I wouldn’t say that most of my friends spoke RP and my brother was bullied for speaking ‘posh’. The way we speak, was down to my family and how we spoke at home. Both of my parents were born in Derby, so it seems a very complex issue. I have worked for many years for a company with 17 different nationalities and we only speak English at work. Therefore it is very important that those of us who speak English as a first language, speak it carefully and in a manner that doesn’t cause misunderstanding
You slipped your London in when you said you'd put a link in to "boaf" editions.
And the word "there" at 14:39. I'm from Hampshire and to me he sounds a lot like a Londoner
@@edkes123 - He also usually drops his t's in the Cockney way.
I don't know who this presenter is, nor his qualifications. But to me he sounds like a Londoner consciously speaking with clearer diction for the benefit of his audience. That is, not RP.
@@iggle6448 It's what he says about himself.
Beelzebop :)