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What the Queen's English revealed about a changing world
- edm0nd 4y ago
- pessimizer 4y agoRecently outdated joke.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wsgeorge 4y agoI've always found old audio recordings fascinating because of just how differently people seemed to speak. It's a shame recording technology came so late, but future generations will have a lot of fun with this, I guess!
- mhh__ 4y agohttps://www.dialectsarchive.com/ https://www.dialectsarchive.com/
- retrac 4y agoIt is still a bit hard to believe that a language changes so much, even during a single person's lifetime. It seems so static when we use it. And yet the proof's right there. I've been noticing it more often, in older films and shows. Even as recent as the 1980s sometimes. They are, in effect, speaking a different dialect. It's not just the groovy phrases they used to use. Intonation patterns have shifted. Some of the vowels are a bit different. What's funny is I don't remember noticing this with some of the same material just 20 years ago; I suppose their accents weren't quite as pronounced yet.
- noneeeed 4y agoThis reminds me of reading The Hobbit to my son last year, I actually found the language quite hard to work with in places. The rhythm is just different to modern English and there were turns of phrase that are rarely used now. It’s amazing the difference a century can make.
- Tangurena2 4y agoAccents change due to status and changing fashions. One such is the "Mid Atlantic" or "Transatlantic" accent. This accent was an attempt to be a neutral midpoint between English & American accents. You'll hear it in older movies from the 30s & 40s (it was dying out in the 50s). 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL2MJ8rQ12E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL2MJ8rQ12E
- masswerk 4y agoThe most idiosyncratic mark is probably an audible starting "h" in question words like "who", "why", "when", etc. And [1] this is a great channel on these topics, recommended.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ljiljana 4y agoI also enjoyed learning about accents in Shakespeare's time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2QYGEwM1Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2QYGEwM1Sk
- delecti 4y agoWhat's fascinating to me is that it's a bit foreign (in the unfamiliar sense, rather than "of another country") but also totally comprehensible, despite being 400 years old.
- ogogmad 4y agoCheck out the accents in this video: https://youtu.be/Xv8Rb-E_Gw4?t=1516 https://youtu.be/Xv8Rb-E_Gw4?t=1516
- Panoramix 4y agoThat was fascinating, I had to watch almost the whole thing
- dundarious 4y agoBeing from nearby, and born in the 80s, I can say that these accents are still common nowadays. However, they were far less common on TV than they were in the population then, and the same is true now. I suppose Eddie Dempsey and Mick Lynch are the most prominent people on TV nowadays who have non-"TV accents".
- Biologist123 4y agoBoth Dempsey and Lynch are second generation Irish immigrants. There’s no criticism, but I’ve recently started to notice the outsized and extraordinary impact of Irish immigrants on mainland Britain. We’re lucky to have them.
- whoooooo123 4y agoNot to mention the haircuts.
- kmote00 4y agoI kept expecting a Monty Python and skit to break out...
- Angostura 4y agoFor a similar evolution in vowel sounds, see also David Attenborough's early programmes.
- umeshunni 4y agoWhat I like the most about this article is that all of the studies referenced in the article are linked directly as PDFs.
- dString 4y agoAnd UK visitors to the site don't even get any ads.
- michael1999 4y agoI'm baffled. Are there any links to audio from her earlier speeches? All I find are transcripts (besides the last Christmas), and links to scholarly texts. It seems bizarre that the BBC doesn't link to their own content archives here.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised if there were some arcane 'crown copyright' rules involved. But given that several episodes of Doctor Who have been lost by the BBC, it also wouldn't surprise me if such recordings of The Queen have likewise been lost.
- Tangurena2 4y agoYou will have to hunt through YouTube. > Over the past few days, millions around the world have watched and listened to the late Queen's broadcast on her 21st birthday in 1947. At the time, she was still a princess, but already determined to make a pledge to her people: "I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service." Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yDDqO4dH3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yDDqO4dH3c Transcript: https://www.royal.uk/21st-birthday-speech-21-april-1947 https://www.royal.uk/21st-birthday-speech-21-april-1947
- elnr 4y agoBBC's video archive, unless it is extremely popular, is almost certainly not going to be avaliable after a few years. Shows published on their streaming platform iPlayer are typically only avaliable for a few months. The BBC archives tend to only be used for creating new or remastering old content rather than for republication in their original form. I agree, it's bizarre.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThe t-glottalization mentioned in the article is now picking up speed in the USA too, most notably (I think) among female speakers. I'm still shocked (as someone who grew up with a cockney-leaning accent) to hear presenters on NPR do t-glottalization, and on the occasions when I'm around millenials, especially millenial women, it's an every-fifth-sentence phenomenon. Given its role as a class status/marker in the UK during my youth, it feels very surprising, but also a great living reminder of how language changes in real time.
- Tagbert 4y agohistorically, linguists have noted that language changes tend to arise among young women. They are more flexible due to age and more socialized than their male peers.
- troad 4y agoThe studies show that women tend to copy high status features ("prestige"), and men tend to copy low status features ("covert prestige"). That is to say, women want to sound like they're class above where they really are (richer, fancier, etc), while men want to sound like they're a class below (rougher, manlier, etc). In fact, upper middle class women have in certain studies been measured to more consistently use prestige features than actual upper class people.
- satellite2 4y agoThis sounds like a very categorical claim. It seems hard to measure, quantize and produce rigorous and replicable results.
- crazygringo 4y agoWhat seems so hard? It sounds pretty trivial to me -- all you're doing is recording samples of people's speech and objectively identifying pronunciation patterns. And it's pretty easy to do before/after with the same people at differing ages (e.g. 15 vs 20) or life stages (e.g. pre-university, university, post-university) to watch change over time. Time-consuming for sure. But not even remotely difficult in terms of rigor or replicability. And if you're familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, you'll see that pronunciation is something that can be analyzed extremely objectively.
- lvxferre 4y ago>in the final years of the Queen's life, her accent reverted to be more similar to the way she spoke in her youth. Not surprising at all. The trick here is to realise three things: 1) People change quite a bit the way that they speak, when they're paying attention to their own speech; that's called "monitored speech". 2) For most individuals, non-monitored speech is rather consistent over the years. The way that you spoke in your early childhood will likely be the same as you speak in your old age; disregarding changes caused by physiology (as vocal folds , everything else will be rather subtle. 3) As you get older, you learn the amazing art of not giving enough of a fuck about irrelevant shit; such as monitoring your own speech. And your public image is pretty much set on stone, too, so there's less of a reason to monitor it. Elizabeth II's non-monitored "default" was that distinctive upper class accent, as expected from someone who was literally raised as a princess. However that accent might be slightly undesirable when you're a queen, as it creates a distance between you and the population, so she slowly "mainstreamised" it under monitored speech. However, as she got older, she stopped monitoring her own speech so much, so she reverted back to her default.