I am very interested to know about the "Upper Class" dialect - the posh speech. I would very much appreciate if you could provide some material because I've tried everywhere and I could not find anything and I hope that you will be able to solve my mistery about this type of speech. I have a feeling that the vowels and the group of vowels are ajusted a bit to form that posh pronunciation. Would you kindly provide some explanation and maybe with some MP3 files attached to them so that I can also listen and get the sound (melody) of this speech. I have also got some friends who are very interested in this as well. Maybe I can suggest that the British Council could put some of this "Upper Class" dialect on the website so that us students could listen, and work on it and get a lot of joy aut of it as well. I am looking forward to see what you can kindly provide.
Many thanks and regards.
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I think the accent you are referring to is RP (Received Pronunciation), which is also known as "Oxford English" ro "BBC English" There are plenty of websites with the kinds of materials you're interested in, so if you just google 'RP pronunciation' etc, I'm sure you'll find them!
CMF
Thank you very much for your reply which is very useful for my neighbour who can't speak english so well. Regarding the Upper Class accent it looks that you haven't had any opportunity to listen to it. Let me give you a tip here and help you listen to such an accent. Type in "You Tube" Pride and prejudice" or "The Importance of Being Earnest" and listen to these and then you'll see what I mean. Hope you'll enjoy this and then you'll be asking the same thing like me :-)
Regards
Bula
Oh, you're referring to these historical plays and films etc, OK. Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were talking about modern day English. For the classroom, I don't think that the accent in Pride & Prejudice is an appropriate model as noone really speaks like that anymore and students will end up just sounding pretentious!
CMF
Thank you again for taking the time to reply.
Yes it is to do with the old way of speaking and it is interesting to hear that if this is taught in classrooms students might sound pretentious and hence they could be taken the mickey out of them which we don't want to cause that inconvenience. I thought that students who want to learn English would appreciate to know the old way of how English used to be spoken and I thought that they might enjoy to know the mechanics of it. But again if they decide to talk like that it could be disappointing as they might find themselves laughed at. Well I suppose it is better to leave the matter alone and if they do come across something and ask questions fine if not, fine again :-)
You can show them the films and even the queen's speaches, but as for training them to speak that way, I doubt it would ever work, to speak with such an accent you have to be brought up in an environment where everybody speaks like that. Even native speakers in other societies in England would sound pretentious if they tried to use a posh accent!
Yes, it's called 'RP' because even 'posh' accents vary from region to region. Therefore, about 100 years ago or so (for those in the army or BBC) they decided to agree on ONE 'posh accent and train people in it. Therefore it is 'received' via training (hence 'received pronunciation) or called 'BBC'. No one is born with it- even the Queen has a slightly different accent to it although they are similar.
Sadly regional accents are dying out in the UK due to TV over-exposure. In 20 years our accent- some of which are dialects in their own right- may be lost.