Acording to a new article in the Telegraph, many more of us are speaking the Queen's English. It is about that only part of her that is. Lots of articles on English from the early nineteen-nineties onwards announced the inevitable onward march of Estuary English. We were no longer having a 'laaff' but a 'larf'.
Now, it seems that the regional accents are holding their own, and that you can draw a line from Northnampton, Birmingham and Portsmouth as the outliers of the South-east. Other accents have maintained their distinctive vowel sounds and regional varaitiosn often depend upon the size of the local population for the dialect.
The grarse spreading out from its London roots is gradually stifling the graaas, but one of Britain's leading accent experts said yesterday that a larf will never drown out a laff.
Students of the voices that make up a patchwork quilt of spoken English across the country have drawn up a map of the way in which the long "a" of received pronunciation has followed the exodus of Londoners into the rest of southern England.
Not so long ago people in counties such as Suffolk,
Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire would pronounce
"grass", "bath" and "after" as if they were spelled with a double "a".
Today,
younger generations will say those words as the Queen does, or indeed
as they do in the Queen Vic on EastEnders, as if the "a" was lengthened
with an "h".
The old, extended "aa" is restricted to southern England west of a line from Cheltenham through Bristol and Bath to the south coast and in a redoubt around Norfolk.
With the huge number of immigrants moving into the country, and settling in London, we can expect more fluid variations, as we can already hear in some of the African and west Indian communities around the outer London suburbs. Accent is more uniform with social mobility, as always. Further accents can be heard at the new British Library website, Sounds Familiar.