Who are those people who associate your so-called “innovative accents with laziness”? What turn of phrase!
It is quite obvious that conservative RP speakers represent your ideal of proper pronunciation. Problem is, this accent represents a class distinction more than anything else. A class you will never belong to. Even your Duchess would not feel entirely attracted to you for reasons of class superiority. And since you don’t seem to belong to this class, your (as authentic as your RP may sound) accent may induce those few thousand speakers to tolerate you, but you will never be accepted in their circles.
And think of the prevailing rest of speakers of English. Who in his right mind would consider an American “lazy” only because he taps his "t"s? That’s the kind of assumption probably everybody involved in this discussion has of an unduly pronounced RP accent; it’s excessively sophisticated.
Stew mentioned a German friend who sounds more northern English than he does. As far as the guys accent goes, he probably likes and respects him for what he represents in terms of genuine performance. A performance that can be found in real places with regular people; something that I described as “genuine” earlier. Conservative RP is restricted to a certain league of chosen people and would-be affiliates.
I mean that to the minds of most UK residents an RP speaker tends to sound rather educated and well-spoken. This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether this perception actually holds true. Speaking with a certain accent does not necessarily correspond to your level of education, but certainly it still is the case that there are working class accents which are different from middle class accents in the UK.
Irish and Australian accents are foreign accents to the ears of a majority of Britons. People tend to think of them as regional accents more than anything else. There are slight differences between ‘educated’ and ‘less educated’ Australian English, but these differences are by no means as marked as they are in the UK.
You’d need to ask the person I discussed the matter with. I personally think of General American as a proper accent.
I think Jamie has answered your question in other threads already.
Older speakers and other speakers who don’t pronounce the same way as “innovative speakers” often frown upon new pronunciations. Obviously these pronunciations sometimes replace earlier standard pronunciations.
A U-RP accent is not an issue to most speakers of English. People don’t care what accent you have, and people certainly don’t mind if you pronounce English as speakers of U-RP do. However perfect your accent may be, you are likely to tell people about your foreign origin at some point. It is assumed that people will understand that foreigners learn all kinds of accents depending on where, when and how they were learning English.
J W is talking, as I said, with tongue in cheek. What fascinates me is from what basis you are talking. You make reference to ‘people this and that’ but from which standpoint? Is it from a Finnish point of view, a world view or are you currently breezing about the UK?
What he writes seems to me like an account of what the accent sounded like back in the 1980s.
Since I live in the UK at the moment and mainly interact with British speakers of English I mostly talk about how UK residents feel about different British English accents.
So you still claim that people mind if you speak U-RP (or near-U-RP)? How can people possibly mind someone speaking with an accent they hardly recognise?
Your comment is largely irrelevant since people don’t care what your accent is as long as they can understand you.
Average native English speakers, I should think. Correct me if I am wrong.
Of course I do. Earth-bound people mind certain things which they don’t recognise (as in conservative RP), because they think that these are/sound phoney or like a desperate attempt to belong to a different class. We’re talking about a dead accent here, and I prefer things alive.
This is also true for semantics. Here, you can be intelligible without desperately trying to use rarely or no longer used high-register words of ancient greek origin.
If average native speakers in your parallel universe should consider American accents and all other accents “lazy”, then I can consider myself lucky to live in a different one.
Surely someone who speaks U-RP or near-U-RP will be understood? Surely these people can form relationships of a friendly nature with people from all classes?
I think stew.t. refers to RP in general i.e. not specifically to U-RP. Mainstream RP/BBC English is a much more common model that U-RP. The major difference between the two is that the former is upper middle class whereas the latter is upper class.
For the record I didn’t use the expression ‘working class’ with reference to a Birmingham accent - such descriptions like upper/middle/working class are quite meaningless when talking about the way people speak and I can’t recall using that vague expression ‘BBC English’. You are so obsessed with different accents that you worry me. Is this typical of all Finns? I don’t know which part of the UK you are living in but my advice is don’t worry too much about all these divisions and sub divisions of accent on which you place such importance. Just enjoy the language written and spoken.
I know what Stew meant, and I did mean “standard RP”. But I’m afraid Alan is right. The last upper class people who speak your UCRP are either dead already or they will be very soon. Do you (a foreigner) really want to be the last remaining representative of a dying class? Thing is, accents don’t distinguish classes anymore. Even you claim to speak RP. Your ideal of a young 1930s Duchess that you can place geographically is a figment of your imagination.
And why speak in a phantom accent anyway? To be ultimately condescending?
‘BBC English’ is not as vague an expression as it may seem. It is actually the expression British phoneticians prefer to use about today’s standard English English accent. The time has come to abandon the archaic term ‘RP’, as one of them pointed out.
Perhaps I should tell you that my other goal is to be able to produce all the sounds represented on the IPA chart and on the extended start for atypical speech. I take a keen interest in phonetics and dialectology, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
The answer to this question is so obvious that I must interpret your question to be rhetorical.
This is exactly what I am doing. Is there something wrong with someone wanting to become a linguist or indeed a phonetician or a dialectologist?
To be honest with you, I sometimes feel sad when I think about how this wonderful variety of English is about to be disappear.
Yes, they do. The differences may not be as marked as they were in the past, but they do exist. Anyone who grew up in Britain knows this (and so does anyone who has studied the accents of the British Isles).
I think it is natural for someone learning a language to want to learn to pronounce that language accurately. A strong foreign accent sometimes impedes communication and reduces clarity, as I am sure you are aware. Now if you are to learn a new tongue, then why not learn the brand of that tongue that you like the most?