The Year That Killed Received Pronunciation (RP)

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As a Canadian raised on Monty Python, I thought making fun of the upper class had ALWAYS been been a part of British identity. Fascinating.

As an American, those comedy sketches would have completely baffled me if you had not told me that they were making fun of the accent.

"This whirlwind of social change had phonetic consequences" is the greatest line ever uttered in a history documentary.

Alternative title: that was the accent that was.

I left the UK in 76 for the USA. When I saw the movie Attack the Block and it's young Londoners I realized that the accent I had grown up with was becoming a fossil.

I started learning English in the Soviet Union at the very end of 80s. We were supposed to learn RP from these squiggles, and maybe some old and well worn reel to reel tapes that were played in class once or twice. We also learned that there's 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, and other such nonsense. We were tested on that, apparently this was important knowledge. I think the textbooks may have been a little out of date. We also learned German from pre-war era textbooks. It's absurd remembering how we were taught in comparison with the language spoken today. I suspect the most up-to-date language curriculum must have been Latin.

A smaller but equally rapid change took place in Sweden at around the same time. In the late 1960s, over the course of just a couple of years, the entire population went from addressing other people using formal titles, last names or "polite" pronouns, to using the informal second-person singular "du" (cognate with "thou", of course) throughout all levels of society. It hugely simplified interactions with people you before the change wouldn't have been on a first-name basis with. Instead of having to figure out what title to use, or resorting to convoluted and bizarre indirect sentence structures, everyone could just use one simple word. It made social interactions much less stressful and it helped lessen the gap between social classes.

In the late 1970's we had a next door neighbor, the Bakers. He was American ands managed the local hardware store. His wife was English, spoke with a very pompous and very posh RP accent. I don't know how posh she was in England, but while he was very down to earth and quite friendly, she gave the impression that she considered herself well above those in her social circle and according to my parents, not very popular. I'm not sure she was entirely happy being married to a man who ran a shop, but he provided for his family well enough. The daughter was my age and we even dated a bit in high school. The house we lived in was part of a brand new development, and my family was the first to move into the street. The yards were all undone, and my dad delighted in having a yard to design. He worked as a welder and he built a heavy duty utility trailer and he let my sister (6) and me (8) choose the color. It was 1978 and we picked the brightest, most obnoxious color we could find. A super bright, day glow green. Dad kept the trailer next to the house and it lit up everything in green. We were all extremely delighted when the English neighbor complained that the trailer "Offended the finer senses." She was right, and that was the point. When dad got his yard installed he sold the trailer to a guy with a landscaping business. I happened to see him, he still had the trailer after owning it for 20 years. I walked up to the guy and asked him about it. I asked if he had it pained that color, or had repainted that color. He said, "No. The man I bought the trailer from said his kids chose the color. I purchased it because I had an accident with another driver who said he did not see the old trailer." I smiled and said, "Well, I'm glad my sister and I picked a good color no one would miss even 20 years later." We laughed and he said no one ever failed to see the trailer. It still offended the finer senses.

At the same time The Beatles were making a working class Liverpool accent more acceptable in Britain, their producer, George Martin, was using an affected upper class British accent to make himself more acceptable in business and social circles. Things were definitely changing.

"As long as we know what we're talking about, we could call the accent Kevin" had me on the floor

Perhaps one lesson is that if you want to kill off some form of speech, you should write a book declaring that it is the new standard!

This reminded me of something I heard from a retired FBI agent who joined the FBI around 1940. He was talking about the rules J. Edgar Hoover had established. One was that all employees had to speak with something close to what he thought of as an American mid-western accent (Which was close to what you heard in the American Hollywood movies of the time.). This was to ensure accurate communications. Any applicant that had a strong regional accent would be rejected.

As an American who lived in England when I was younger, I found it interesting that you could tell a lot more about someone's socioeconomic class in England from their speech than you could in the United States.

I'm a New England native having morning coffee and seeing what random videos are popping up on my feed. I had little interest in this topic yet you captured my full attention throughout. Oh, if only more university professors here had your excellent communication skill! Thank you.

I’m an American and always loved hearing RP in old movies. As a child I liked movies with Ronald Colman and David Niven, who made English sound beautiful.

With regard to the change of social perceptions of accents, something I stumbled upon recently was that you can find recordings of election results programmes from different years on Youtube. This was fascinating to me as you can see how the speech of the presenters change over time. They always inherently tend towards formal and "posh" speech as heavyweight political TV commentators, and the event itself is one of the most formal and "serious" on TV, so it's hardly a snapshot of normal speech, and the speech on such programmes will always appear rather stuffy and formal, even slightly archaic at the time of broadcast, but it's a constant setting that you can compare throughout the years. (And you hear the contrast of the "posh, presentery" with regional accents from candidates and pundits in any single programme) So I was looking through some of these, fascinated at hearing the historic accents, when I stumbled into the 1997 coverage, when I was a couple of years too young to vote, but definitely remember watching it all at the time. (I very dimly recall 1992, but 1997 was really my "first" election as an observer) And I was struck by how almost comically archaic some of the accents sounded! Yet, I never had this sense at the time. It would have sounded a bit stuffy, sure, but not amusingly alien. A real eye-opener on how much my own perceptions must have changed with the changing of the language!

How can you generate such a comprehensive discussion without once mentioning, even in passing, My Fair Lady?

oh my god, i love that credits sequence. i can't wait for the follow-up to this video

Lovely work on the closing credits too!