Question:
Can anyone provide any information why the "upper class" accent in
England differs so much from other regional accents.
Are there historical links through nobility and royalty with accents
spoken in other European countries?
Answer:
No links. But what exactly do you mean by "the 'upper class' accent? If
Received Pronunciation, perhaps in an extreme form, then it developed from a
regional accent, the English of South and South-East England.
This became a class accent in the 19th century, when most boys from wealthy
families were sent away to boarding school from the age of 7 to 18, many of
them then going on to Oxford or Cambridge Universities or into the officers'
messes of élite regiments. Girls from similar families were taught by
governesses with the same accent and then went off to Paris or Rome where
they mixed with others like themselves. The restricted social groups within
which these people moved confirmed and exaggerated their shared accent, which
differed markedly from the regional accents of their own counties. Even
today, a Scottish aristocrat will probably speak with a non-Scottish "upper
class" accent, as modelled by his parents and his friends.
Middle-class families adopted a less extreme version of the same non-regional
accent, and it is this version that appears in British dictionaries as
standard. Most middle-class (not just "upper class") Southerners sound
"la-di-dah" or affected to those who speak in other accents, especially
Northerners. For some years, however, there has been a tendency for speakers
of RP or its upper-class exaggeration to modify their speech in the direction
of current South-East urban demotic, creating the so-called "Estuary English"
heard, for example, from the Prime Minister. This is not a regional accent,
and some who use it in public slip back into "upper class" in private. Very
noticeably, young people whose families speak in RP or hyper-RP often adopt
Estuary English during their teens and twenties but then revert in full
adulthood to their old "upper class" speech.
I assume that there is no German equivalent of an accent determined by social
class rather than region of origin?
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