Variously referred to as the 'Queen's English', 'BBC English' or 'Oxford English',
What is the Queen's English? The Queen's English is also often called BBC English. It is the standard English which most non-native English speakers associate with people from the UK. It includes Received Pronunciation – the “posh” accent that the Queen uses – as well as grammatically correct utterances free of slang.
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English.
The standard British accent is something called received pronunciation, or RP. Geographically, people who speak with this accent live in the southeastern part of England. This is traditionally a “posh” part of England, so this accent is considered to be upper/middle class.
Glasgow takes the lead as being the hardest UK accent to understand, with 39% of votes; Tyneside emerges as the second most difficult with 20%; and Liverpool follows in third with 18%.
People tend to think a foreign accent is more interesting and more sexy, says Guy Winch, a psychotherapist from Britain who's long been based in the United States, “because in general we tend to value what's less common.” Americans associate a British accent with someone being “more intelligent, more sophisticated and ...
Our analysis reveals that the Queen's pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy.
It seems likely then that at least some of the changes to the Queen's accent were simply a reflection of the people she came into contact with. The period between 1950 and 1970 saw enormous social revolution in Britain, Harrington and Reubold note.
British English (BrE) is a term used to distinguish the form of the English language used in the British Isles from forms used elsewhere. It includes all the varieties of English used within the Isles, including those found in England, Scotland, Wales, and the island of Ireland.
In reality, there are almost 40 different dialects in the UK that sound totally different from each other, and in many cases use different spellings and word structure. In fact, there's pretty much one accent per county.
My latest video analyses King Charles's RP accent. Received Pronunciation (RP) was the upper class accent during the last century or so of the British empire. There aren't that many speakers of classic RP left.
Although Victoria spoke English fluently, she nonetheless had a German accent, so two tutors were engaged to help her get rid of it.
To define 'posh', in the case of accents, posh is the name given to an accent that is proper. Also known as 'Queen's English', the posh accent is the most desirable for many and one that is widely understood by non-native speakers.
Where did the British accent come from? It started in the 1800s.
1. French. Her Majesty The Queen was fluent in French, as she learned it from a young age. Her childhood governess Marion Crawford wrote in the book The Little Princess that the Queen's French teacher made her write “endless columns of verbs in her lessons”.
Linguistic research finds that accents considered sexy usually suggest more than a pleasing sound. For example, the British accent may indicate intelligence and high social status, specifically attractive to Americans. However, Italian accents suggest intense romance and a laidback attitude that Europeusens find sexy.
The French accent, previously considered the sexiest in the world, has been dethroned by the British accent, aka the Queen's English, in a global study carried out by Time Out in over 30 countries. Sacrebleu! The French accent has lost the first spot as the world's sexiest accent to Queen's English.