In Praise of Linguistic Diversity

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I read with some amusement in today's i, that RP - received pronunciation, AKA the Queen's [or now, King's] English is now being recognized as an accent. When I was growing up, posh people spoke 'proper' and the rest of us plebs had 'accents' or even spoke in dialect, heaven forfend. I've long held the view that the Queen, God bless her, spoke in the strangled tones of someone who'd suffered rather poor elocution lessons, often sounding in her early days like - shock, horror - a person of lower station or actress - trying to up their linguistic game.

The fact is, that all accents are just that: accents. How any particular accent is judged societally is down to whether or not we see beyond the vocalisations of those concerned. Let's face it, there's posh and there's poshest: all the public schools output young adults with accents that vary according to school.

An Etonian is as distinguishable from a Harrovian to a linguist, as a Scouser is from a Brummie, both phonetically and dialectically. The old debate about accented versus 'proper' speech, unacceptable versus acceptable forms of address, is about to be consigned to the skip of history: to be fair, the posh haven't exactly covered themselves in glory, really have they? It looks like Amol Rajan is on a crusade - which he will undoubtedly win - to redress the balance of speech across the Beeb, which will hopefully filter out into society that 'accent' is simply a fact of lingustics, and not one of class or worth...

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