Daily Mail article - attitudes to accents - Tuesday 15th

My intended target audience will be 'The Daily Mail' readers who are interested in changing accents and dialects, and people who have prescriptive and descriptive views on the subject.


Is Received Pronunciation the only respectable accent?

Map of Great Britain and Ireland
showing results of a survey of
most favoured accents

For decades, controversy has filled the topic of conversation on regional dialects and accents defining who we are and our intelligence, with the country torn between believing that they are a part of our unique identity and a rich factor in our social and regional upbringing, adding a so called 'spice' or 'flavour' to the way our country's mode of talk operates, whereas many believe quite the opposite that strong regional accents have an undesired effect on the way we speak and effectively dampens the quality and eloquence of Received Pronunciation. However, in the scheme of things our country would seem pretty boring and dull if we all spoke in the same accent and dialect, don't you think?

Giles' matched guise technique found that Received Pronunciation is the most impressive and influential accent when imposing certain arguments, and that the brummie accent was the least desirable and imposing; however these arguments coming from a variety of accents and regional dialects were all the same, showing that, with the same concept of speech being heard from different accents, people still judge them differently on how convincing and appealing they are. Although the study was 40 years ago, the image to your right still shows results of brummie being the least favourable accents; showing that stereotypical judgment is still occurring today, and presumably in everyday life. Along with this, we frequently hear people saying that people cannot present on national television because of their accent being 'too strong' or 'not neutral enough'; is this the harsh truth, or are people actually discriminating?

Throughout the world and especially in our country, people are constantly trying, possibly when they move homes or cities or during university, to get along with people, many a time in which people from different regions of our land using different dialects and strong opposite accents occur - when this happens, do we have to hide our true prescriptive thoughts of other 'snotty' accents, or shall we actually enjoy experiencing other fascinating accents and become descriptive people? Shall we judge or explore? This can occur from a wide scale of accents deemed acceptable or unacceptable; so called posh people may make judgements on a strong regional accent like scouse, and then a scouse may judge a more standard pronunciation accent. Will our country ever truly get along, or will we just act as if we do?

If received pronunciation is considered to be the 'correct' accent to talk with, then why is it that only 2% of the population of England speak that way. That statistic along with many others show the wide cultural diversity our country has, we should be embracing it, not being hypocritical about it and make judgements on people purely because of their accent.

Studies show that over a few decades, 'the forms and norms of received pronunciation inevitably drift, it is influenced by the Southern British Speech Community', and this quote is backed up by analysts stating that the Queen has over the years been slowly trying to converge with the people, as her received pronunciation 'levels' have gradually dropped; so, this shows that RP may not be the wanted accent after all!