What's the relation between language and class in Britain?

layman john   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 03:33 GMT
from the way you people are talking about british accents, it seems as though no accent is native and that everyone in the UK is simply faking it. imagine that...an entire country faking their accents! if RP or Estuary or cockney or what have you is an accent in the same way that there's a moscow russian accent as opposed to a st. petersburg russian accent or perhaps in the same way that there's an arkansas accent and a new jersey accent in the states, then how can these things be picked up or modified to fit certain circumstances? in other words, you speak the way you speak, and if you put on another accent, then you are faking it.

i don't have a problem with faking accents. i love the british accent and would love to fake one aside from that all my friends and relatives would laugh at me for it. my point is simply that if "RP" isn't fashionable anymore or "modified" is the new cool thing, then these things are not even accents at all in the first place! you can't just one day decide to speak RP because it's trendy......you'd simply be faking it in the same way that an american might try to fake a british accent.

so what's the deal? is britian faking its accent? has this been a centuries-long running joke perpetuated by a small island of people who have long ago decided tacitly to fool the rest of the world?
layman john   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 03:37 GMT
i just wanted to add something....


about the "david beckham should tiy up his accent" comment. what do you mean tidy up his accent? that's like telling a person living in oklahoma to tidy up his accent so that it sounds new england. so what you're saying is that now that david beckham is rich, he should fake a new accent? you can't pick up accents the way you pick up your dry cleaning. it's called faking....FAKING.
Adam   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 03:45 GMT
I think that layman john has a point.
Ved   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 05:14 GMT
Here's a short imaginary exchange you might overhear at a lower-end grocery store in South London:

A: Wheh's v swee'ies?

B: Vey ain't 'ere.

A: Blimey, vey was 'ere last w-uh-eek.

B: You're talking rubbish, swee''eart, vey was never 'ere. Look in oyle
t-uh-wo.

Or somefing of v sor'.
Jenny   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 07:28 GMT
Jordi,

you wrote: "There is still quite a difference between broadcasters in Australian ABC and other more regional stations. Although the accent is recognisable I can assure you the official one still sounds more "British" at least to fluent foreign ears or even to Americans."

The differences between the broadcasters largely depends on the style of program being broadcasted but I wouldn't say one sounds more British than another. Some broadcasters sound more formal than others and this could give a false impression of additional Britishness. Yet any cross section of the spectrum of Australian accents is often mistaken for British by foreign ears. One program focussing on rural issues will inevitably have presenters who speak differently, in a kind of regional accent compared to what is considered correct for reading the news. Sorry, I don't hear any difference between broadcasters on ABC radio and the multitude of commercial stations either.

Another thing, on ABC there is often a relay of BBC news services and this is when British voices are heard on it. This could be what you were thinking about and mistaking for Australian. But the ABC on its budget couldn't afford to import them to take on board unless they fell into its lap.
Jordi   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 11:00 GMT
I grew up in Australia in the 60s and 70s. I'm now in my mid-40s. I still am considered to be Australian by my British friends although my accent tends to be quite educated in all languages. I met a Welsh guy yesterday and he asked me if I was Australian.
For many years, and since I live in Catalonia, I rarely heard Australians although I was quite exposed to Brits and to the English language. I majored in English translation. The few Australians I heard were mainly educated Australians abroad and in Europe. The accent sounded quite the same to what I recalled back in my Sydney childhood and adolescence.
About three years ago, and after 25 years, I began to hear Australian Radio Stations through the Internet. Intonation doesn't change as much -and it is the main characteristic of the Autralian accent- regardless of regional or city broadcasters. I can assure you that accent (especially the vowels but also some consonants such as the "t") sound definitely slighlty different for a linguist if heard on the ABC news network or in some Queensland station news. They both definitely sound Australian but the ABC tends to keep a more conservative, and therefore more RP, pronunciation. A alot has been published, and can be found in the Internet, regarding Broad, General and Educated Australian by Australians themselves.
For an Australian speaker who hadn't been heavily exposed to Australia for more than two decades I can assure the diffference was there and I was shocked the first few days. Funnily enough I received friends from Australia a couple of years ago and I was surprised to hear from them that my voice was definitely mostly Australian but somewhat old-fashioned, according to them.
You could hardly consider me "foreign" if you heard me although I definitely couldn't be take as a model of 2005 Australian accent and tend to have a more "international". I'm proud of the Australia within me and I can assure you I've never done a thing to change my accent. If it has changed slightly it has been against my will and due to exposure to other accents.
I'm very interested on this subject and would appreciate your thoughts.
Jordi   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 11:03 GMT
I write too fast and don't edit. A few mistakes here and there. Please forgive me.
Jenny   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 13:06 GMT
Off the top of my head, I can relate Barry Humphries' (Dame Edna Everage's alter ego) accent to RP. He is Australian and though I'm not very familiar with his background, he would have been a creation of the 60s on stage standard you spoke of. The stage has always been his life but he also spent a lot of his career making it big in Britain. The two would vouch for his RPish accent. It seems this phenomenon is shared with other performers and actors but is mostly isolated to these types of professions. So, I think today these influences come as a result of contact made with the British market. I can't see them arising internally as they did in the past.

With the above paragraph as some kind of reference, I don't hear anything specially more "RP" on the ABC compared to the major commercial stations. Not overall anyway. When you say you find quite a difference, is there anything in particular? I can understand where you're coming from when it comes to Artsy-fartsy programming and the like but I wouldn't imagine it having much of an audience. Well the ABC generally doesn't do well. At the moment, the ABC is dominated by BBC programming so I all I hear are British voices nonstop!

I don't relate a conservative Australian accent to being more RP like you do or as you might with the early part of last century. RP is harsh for an Australian context today. Maybe you can cite an example of an Australian figure to illustrate your point?
Jordi   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 18:04 GMT
First of all, I don't believe or relate to RPish accents in Australia although in all the languages I know you usually can tell a lot of background just from hearing the way somebody speaks, regardless of his accent.
It would seem, though, that evolution in Australian accents could be even faster if more regional (or more popular) elocution was taken as part of the National Australian standard.
I'm not speaking of British people or British programming but of people who are very "speech conscious" and try to speak "more proper English". It seems they still have some kind of prestige although not everybody would accept this statement.
This would definitely be the case amongst English professors, for example and, of course, the Artsy-fartsy, as you say.
Television is dubbed in Spain but I do remember seeing "Neighbours" (Australian soap opera) a couple of years ago in London.
There was definitely a difference between the way adults (over 40) delivered their Australian English and the way the much "younger" crowd did it. Remember I'm only interested in "accents" and not in the soap opera itself. I'm not strictly speaking of vocabulary or idioms which can always have "a generational" thing to them and "new generational" slang always happens. Most of that usually dies out when one turns 35, although a few things remain in the language. Nobody speaks like teenagers in the 50s or 70s and I'm sure you know what I mean. Anyway not even teenagers of my age would use (or even remember) a few of the things we used to say.
There, obviously, is somewhat more American influence in the speech of young Australians than in the 60s and 70s. That is hardly surprising and it even happens in the UK. Even more so on both sides of the Pacific and Australians seem to be heavily influenced by the American media. It's not criticism I'm just making a description, please remember that.
I'm speaking of phonetics. I remember my Australian English teachers correcting me all the time when I was a lad back in Oz. The favourite phrase of one of them would be "How American!". Children is the 60s already saw quite a bit of American television. You were expected to speak a more British standard in the late 60s and early 70s. It's "territry" and not "territory", I also remember that one. I wouldn't have dared, back then, to say "li-bra-ry" with three syllables. I would have to make my "t" quite sharp and say "better" and "later" and not something which sounds, more often than not, like "bedder" when heard in young Australian voices. And you were expected to lower the openness of some of your Australian vowels (a vain intent, I agree).
I'm not saying, please don't misunderstand me, that Australian shouldn't remain Australian and evolve. They should. I just wanted to know if ysome oung Australians had the feeling that their elders spoke with a slightly more "posh" accent than they do. Please give the word "posh" a strictly non-offensive meaning.
It's all for the better, I imagine.
I love Australian culture, bush songs and country music and that is why I listen to quite a lot of those programmes on Internet Radio. I also listen to, once in a while, to Australian broadcasters on the ABC news. I repeat, Australian and only Australian. I travel to England a few times a year and see English people almost every day. I perfectly know ehat they sound like and there is quite a variety. On the ABC all the "a" are clearly pronounced as "dans" "frans" although I still pronounce "daens" "fraens". I'd say lots of them like "castle" and I "can't" but not 100%. The fact is ABC expects its broadcasters to say them all.
Well maybe you can tell me more.
Easterner   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 19:44 GMT
About "faking" accents, I think it's not the case. In every country there is a "standard" accent, and in some countries people from different parts of the country simply have to use that because there is such a dialectal variety that otherwise they may have difficulty understanding each other. Britain is one such country, and people there use a common accent like RP, or, nowadays more and more, Estuary, Germany is another, and a standard accent called "Hochdeutsch" is used there, while people may use a different accent when at home, where everybody uses the same accent. And language use in Britain still seems to be more "class-conscious" than, say, in the USA, which means that "low-status" accents (such as working-class ones) can easily be stigmatised, although the popularity of Estuary and, indeed, the fact that David Beckham is not "ashamed" of his accent seems to point to a change in this respect. It is the same in Hungary, too: here the country is more homogenous as far as dialects are concerned, but the status of the dialect spoken in Budapest is higher than that of other dialects spoken in various parts in the countryside. You may or may not like this, but that's life.
Toasté   Thursday, January 06, 2005, 23:11 GMT
I can see Jordi's point about TV accents. A few years ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation rebroadcast some old programming to celebrate some anniversary and I was struck by how peculiar the announcers sounded.

They didn't quite sound British, but there was certainly a quality to the way they spoke that hinted at a British influence. I have never run into anyone here who sounded that way naturally, so it must have been some kind of CBC accent.
Jenny   Friday, January 07, 2005, 00:28 GMT
Jordi,

It's hard to generalise the older generation. Some are very educated yet have this croaky, almost crass accent like Bob Hawke (a former prime minister) had while others are silky smooth. He would never fake a posh accent, maybe he couldn't but I'd say he spoke correctly neverthless. So there are elders and there are elders.

"Better" "bedder" is just a matter of speed and mode I would have thought since I use both. "territry" hasn't changed. The "dahnce" "frahnce" thing is pretty much regional but a British influence would encourage this pronunciation. Maybe with their ties the BBC is behind this plot. It seems strange that a radio station would go out of its way to employ speakers of strictly one pronunciation model. In NZ, these are the only pronunciations but in Australia it's both "dahnce", "frahnce" and "daence", "fraence". The announcers on the other radio stations that host similar content to the ABC sound conservative too. The stations that promote modern music are not but they always make room for correct diction where appropriate. They're not going to get a crude character off the street to read the news! The "standards" in Britain are much higher.
Ved   Friday, January 07, 2005, 03:45 GMT
Although both .au and .nz English are (naturally) more similar to British than to North American English, I almost never have a problem telling my Aussies and Kiwis apart from my Pommies. Furthermore, it's also fairly easy to tell if an Antipodean speaker is an Australian or a Kiwi.

What I find hard is to tell South African or Zimbabwean native English speakers from Australians, unless they use a typically South African word that gives them away.
Ved   Friday, January 07, 2005, 03:52 GMT
Easterner, if I may ask, how was your Subotica accent received in Budapest? Do you still have a Vojvodinian accent? How different is it from Budapest Hungarian?

I guess it's fairly easy to guess where you're from, just like it is probably quite easy to tell you are from Subotica (as opposed to Belgrade or Novi Sad) when you're speaking Serbo-Croatian.

I have the slightest Vojvodinian lilt in my SC speech (a Pancevo accent, just 17 km from downtown Belgrade) and many Belgraders have no problem detecting it.
Jordi   Friday, January 07, 2005, 10:13 GMT
Dear Ved, Jenny, Easterner and Toasté:
The things about accents is that you usually can't pinpoint them unless you are heavily exposed to them. Brits usually understand Americans much better than Americans understand Brits. It's all due to "how much" you get of the brand. For most Brits (and Australians and NZ) all Americans sound exactly the same, except, perhaps for "Gone with the Wind", which gave us an early start as far as southern American accents go. We've also heard most American presidents.
As you know lots of Australian productions are shown on British TV and lots of Australians and NZ expats now live in the London area. Earls' Court, in London sometimes seems an Australian suburb when you hear the voices. Australian has also become one of the accents in London and the UK, if you know what I mean. When these expats come back home they are bound to recover their old selves but how many traces will be forever left in their diction?
I even saw Australian "kindergarten programmes" on a British TV once in my hotel room. It was definitely the "silky smooth" variation Jenny reports but I wasn't wronged for a second and the titles at the end were definitely Australian. Imagine all those Brits teaching their children with a smooth version of Aussie.
The reason why you don't recognise South African or Zimbabwean (God, it must have been easier to say Rhodesia!) English is because you haven't been exposed to them. It is true that "Antipodean" (let's forget the word "colonial") English had a similar evolution background and evolution, in many ways, and that it is very much in debt with 19th and early 20th century English. The educated Indians and Pakistanis I've heard all seem to speak beautiful Imperial English, with an accent, of course. I can assure you South Africans sound different to Australians, even the ones of pure English descent. The problem, again, is when they evolve towards a more "posh" or "educated" diction and accent. All Souther Hemisphere native English speakers tend to meet somewhere on the line, even more so when these varieties come straight from the ship, in quite recent historical times, and they often still have an English Queen of the State, a Governor General and the prestige of RP reached the end of the 20th century. That would also explain some British overtones in early Canadian TV. When you live in a country you are tuned to all the surrounding accents and you can't hear as well as the rest. Differences, though, seem to wane, even more, as you get further from the source.