#like seriously looooong post

It goes in to a bit of a rant, but hopefully explains why we’re such pedants about why a “British” accent being considered stick-up-the-arse posh is a misunderstanding, and why we might be a bit touchy about the bo’ul of wor’uh thing.

So, first up: accents in the UK are very much a class marker. I know that’s true everywhere, but it is really pronounced here. Because of our linguistic history, we’ve historically had enormous regional variation in accents for such a small landmass, as well as a second accent spoken by landowners regardless of geographical location. Historically, therefore, your social class could be discerned by where you were on the scale of ‘regional accent’ to ‘posh person accent’.

To an extent, this applies/applied to Scottish and Welsh accents, too. Really posh Scottish people do not have, or have a very slight Scottish accent. This is not an accident, nor something people were unaware of - I was reading a book from the 1930s recently where someone was discussing her child’s education and bemoaning his accent, saying “a touch of Perthshire is charming,” but that he’d been spending too much time with shepherds and gamekeepers, and was being essentially ‘too Scottish’.

So, because the vast majority of the Very Posh and Very Wealthy were educated at about three schools, two universities, and inhabited once social sphere, they all spoke - and were taught to speak - in the same way. The name for this accent, as I’m sure a lot of you know, is “Received Pronunciation,” or RP, and we all know what it sounds like, right?

Or do we?

What Maggie Smith (and most of the other actors there) are speaking *is* RP, but it’s not a particularly thick RP accent. Smith - because she’s a great actor and knows what she’s about - is speaking thicker RP than the others, and that’s doing the work of letting you know she’s posher and more old fashioned than anyone else she’s talking to - but still, her vowels are mostly soft and broad, her consonants clearly articulated. It is stage RP, schoolroom RP - but not from an Eton/Harrow/Westminster schoolroom. It’s the sort of accent you were taught at grammar schools, or small private schools to rid you of your regional accent.

Now, of course, if you speak like that in any normal place in in the UK, people *are* going to assume you’re posh. But it is upper middle class posh, working in the Professions posh, rather than “owns half of Buckinghamshire” posh. It’s designed for clarity - which is what people think RP is all about. But it isn’t.

RP is a shibboleth. It’s actually not a particularly clear accent, and it is designed to mark the people who know it apart from those who do not.

Here is a much thicker RP accent: https://youtu.be/mBRP-o6Q85s

(apologies for the national anthem at the start)

If you see, the vowels are a lot higher and tighter, the consonants less clearly pronounced. But it’s still fairly intelligible - Liz is public speaking here and the majority of her audience will not be RP speakers, so she’s speaking slowly and clearly, and she still wishes to be accessible and comprehensible. If you want to hear a seriously thick RP accent, it’s worth looking up some early 20th century radio broadcasts.

The difference is in the emphasis given to vowels over consonants, as well as how much you move your lips. I’m not good at writing IPA as I’ve only done a bit of linguistics, but to give an example - if you wanted to say “I am speaking clearly,” stage RP might pronounce the word “clearly” as KLEER-lee, two distinct syllables, with a clear but simple vowel sound. A sort of mid level RP might say something more like KLE-ahr-lee, giving more vocalisation to the a and the r, making it almost three syllables, although one without emphasis. Really thick RP almost pronounces it as klAR-le, with almost even emphasis between the syllables, and the stress on the ar, rather than the kl.

But although plenty of people still use it, that very thick RP accent has become almost invisible over the course of the 20th century, as part of (if I put my paranoid socialist hat on) a campaign to render invisible the hereditary privilege and enormous wealth disparity which affects pretty much every aspect of British life. Which is to say, the very small number of people who can speak with and identify each other by a thick RP accent still literally own most of the country.

Even if I’m to be a little less red, the fact is during the 20th century, it became expedient for the accepted voice of radio and television to become less that of landowners and hereditary authority, and more like that of the middle classes. Even ‘The Queen’s English’ changed, as the Queen and several politicians took elocution lessons to sound “warmer and more approachable.” At the same time, Britain had a period of unprecedented social mobility in the post-War period and - much like the American conception of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” - there gradually emerged this cultural idea that everyone was, or perhaps could be, “middle class.”

Even as this was starting to happen, and markers of “middle class respectability” spread (especially in the South East of England) the countercultural movements of the 60s and 70s rejected this very move and identified itself with everything their parents found ‘low’ or ‘shocking’. One of the markers of this was that middle class boys from the Home Counties adopted a kind of ‘mockney’ accent, which along with the success of a handful actually working class artists meant that having a vaguely working-class, vaguely South-Eastern accent became a sign of counter cultural validity and authenticity. (All of this is, ofc, a vast oversimplification - but it’s a general trend.)

From here we have the rise of the Estuary accent. Estuary English is a vague conglomeration of RP and the accents found around the Thames Estuary. It’s neither Essex, nor London, nor Kent, but a broad mingling of the three. It is easily learned and adopted, and - as a composite accent - has none of the shibboleths of real cockney, or Essex, or RP. To speak cynically, it is an accent uniquely suited to code switching. If you have access to RP, then estuary is an accent where you can ‘choose’ how thickly you speak it, or whether you intersperse it with another accent. (An example my mum always points out, although this is a bit pre-Estuary, is in Mother’s Little Helper, Mick Jagger pronounces all his “th” as “v” - but doesn’t use a single glottle stop.)

Beyond the “clear, warm, and authoritative” idea of a mild RP accent, estuary offered a “relatable” and, more importantly, “authentic” feel. Its use as a political tool further closed the gap between people’s perception of their class (and promoted the idea of the UK as a ‘classless society, which, lol) and their actual circumstances. The wildest example of this is perhaps Victoria Beckham describing being driven to school on a Rolls Royce while claiming her family was “very working class.”

Now, Estuary English has a really complicated place in the UK especially in the way it has homogenised regional accents, but one good thing about it is that it normalises and even valorises patterns of speech that have been historically mocked, excluded, and treated as markers of poverty, criminality, and stupidity. Double negatives, the glottal stop, using a hard “ff” for “v” sounds, and a “v” for “th”, and where someone the ‘drops’ and vocalises ‘h’. I said earlier that RP was a shibboleth, and these were some of the most commonly observed tells that someone didn’t belong. Given that the vast majority of social power in England rested in the same area that the estuary accent drew its sources from, it bears a lot of similarities to the accent of the working classes in those areas - the ones most often mocked, parodied, or disparaged by those in power.

And the thing is, people still have those accents - or they have adopted the similar estuary in place of those accents - but unlike BBC talk show hosts, or politicians trying to convince you they’re a “man of the people,” these people *cannot* code switch. They have no access to RP, and their accent - despite being mainstreamed and in some ways privileged - is still used a shorthand for vulgarity and stupidity. It remains a punchline, a joke. They are still constrained by it - they can’t put it aside or mitigate it in formal situations, they can’t leverage RP to their advantage when it suits, and thereby use their actual accent as proof of “authenticity”. For them, the shibboleths remain - just (like thick RP) hidden now.

I don’t want to call it cultural appropriation, because that’s not quite the right term, but there is something very cruel in that way that - in one of the most classist and economically unequal countries in Europe - an accent which apes several working class accents has become enormously culturally privileged, but only when it is NOT used by somebody working class. And although that isn’t apparent to the casual observer - not even the people being totally shafted here - there is, I think, this broad cultural sense that we’ve been had. That we’ve been played for fools on some level it’s really difficult to quantify.

We have been told that class and accent no longer matter - but every day in our lives, they transparently *do*. So anyone hearing my “middle class vowels” will assume I’m posh, and have endless contacts and support - despite the fact I lived a lot of my adult life below the poverty line - but in any situation where being perceived as posh would get me contacts and support, it’s immediately apparent I’m not part of the Old School Tie, because I don’t talk quite right.

Or how a poor kid with an Essex accent will be told they couldn’t *possibly* be discriminated against because of their class, because that’s how all the presenters on Radio 1 talk, meanwhile whole comedy sketches are still written about how ‘ugly’ and ‘stupid’ the Essex accent sounds.

Or how an accent that is somehow globally understood to be one of power and privilege (be it RP or estuary) and can therefore be ‘punched up’ against is - at home - only ever used to punch down on us. How people who want to ‘do well’ have had regional accents beaten out of them (in some cases literally) and were granted conditional acceptance for it, while the same people who’ve owned the country since the Middle Ages got to slum it down with us, without surrendering any of their money or privilege.

It’s… complicated, okay?