h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>It increases street cred among the young from an RP background and young people with local accents adopt it because it sounds more 'sophisticated'.

It might be because I've been trying for the past 15 years to shake off this accent myself, but I really disagree with this. Hearing a brother's friend who has a really strong EE accent just reminds me of how common I consider this accent. Sorry, but there you go. Horrible, nasty, common.

Good entry though.

Hello Mina,

interesting, but the situation i was trying to describe was more related to 'country bumpkin' accents, in the West Country, for instance.

<stands back to avoid stream of abuse, unwarranted though - personally i love that accent, )

the idea being that rather than sound all 'ooh arr ooh ey', it's cooler to sound kinda like a lunner.

still might be wrong, but in a different context.

thanks for dropping by,
spiff

*Puckah, ma'e, i'm on the fron' page! *

A very good point, I hadn't thought of it like that. I wasn't sure what 'RP' meant, although I've got a feeling that I asked when this was in Peer Review. Things never seem to stay in my head for very long...

There's a link to the received pronunciation (RP) entry, .

I answer phones all night and drunken Estuary English can be one of the harder accents to understand. This despite having lived in London for 13 years.

Was born in Essex, moved to Brighton and still haven't got out of the habit of dropping the `t` in words. Losing the `y` in the middle of small words is becoming more and more commonplace, especially down on the South coast. They don't seem to teach the kids Shakespeare anymore, or watch good performances of spoken English, not just plays, but also the News on television. I'm not saying that the Queen's English is the perfect manner of speaking, but there isn't the effort put into it anymore. We are in danger of regionalism destroying effective communication.

Actually, it's easy to teach anyone to speak RP.
Ask them to write the following three words:
1. air
2. hare
3. lair
Ask them to say the words one after the other and they'd get into Cranwell.