The Queen's English

By Hermione Gray

THE QUEEN'S English ain't what it used to be. Research compared how HRH pronounced certain words over the last 40 years. They discovered that 'estuary English' had influenced those cultured vowels, making Her Majesty altogether a little more common, guv'nor.

Back in the 1950s, the Queen pronounced 'pat, mat and man' as 'pet, met and men. These days, she sounds younger and less snooty.

Dr Jonathan Harrington, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, carried out the research. He says the Queen's accent reflects a reaction to the erosion of class hierarchies.

In the 50s, English accents were as clearly marked as the rigid social groups. But as class distinctions have become more blurred, so too have the boundaries between accents that mark social class.

The trend is away from the clipped Celia Johnson to the sort of standard southern British accent favoured by BBC Radio 4 presenters.

'This is quite an interesting change,' says Harrington, 'it shows that although the Queen's vowels have shifted in the direction of a 1980s' standard southern British accent, this change doesn't involve any loss of clarity. Quite the opposite in fact.'

His report points out that although modern pronunciation has resisted many features of the cockney accent, it has, nevertheless, been influenced by cockney. The Queen avoids the dropped aitches, glottal stops and 'innits', but the researchers believe that traces of the East End can be found in her accent.

Harrington claims there is no point in anyone worrying about the Queen's loss of poshness, since any bid to freeze accents in time is 'as unlikely to succeed as King Canute's attempts to defeat the tides.'

Are accents as important as they used to be Does it matter if you sound like a Scouser or an East Ender Would life be simpler if you weren't catagorised by your vowel sounds Click hereto speak out.