The Queen's English is no longer as posh as it used to be

Queen Elizabeth II's famous cut-glass accent, the Queen's English, is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific analysis of her famous Christmas broadcasts has found.

Researchers told AFP they used digital technology to analyse each of her messages to the Commonwealth since her 1952 accession.

They tracked the subtle evolution in her speech from the aristocratic so-called "Upper Received Pronunciation" to the less plummy "Standard Received Pronunciation" -- a close relative of the decidedly common "Standard Southern British English".

Phoneticians have documented changes in pronunciation and dialect over 60 years using sound recordings.

But author Jonathan Harrington, professor of phonetics and digital speech processing at the University of Munich, wanted to see whether those same changes over time could be registered using one person.

The Christmas messages are high-quality recordings, delivered by the same person in the same format and tone over 53 years -- making Queen Elizabeth's accent perfect to analyse, he said.

"As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast archive," said Harrington.

He said the aristocratic way of pronouncing vowels had gradually ceased to be a class apart over the decades -- something noticable in the queen's speech.

"Her accent sounds slightly less aristocratic than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very subtle and slow changes that we don't notice from year to year," he explained.

"In 1952 she would have been heard referring to 'thet men in the bleck het'. Now it would be 'that man in the black hat'.

"Similarly, she would have spoken of 'the citay' and 'dutay', rather than 'citee' and 'dutee', and 'hame' rather than home. In the 1950s she would have been 'lorst', but by the 1970s 'lost'.

"There are not many people who speak like that now. We now produce this vowel with a slightly lower jaw and more open mouth. This is one of the changes in which the queen has participated too."The changes in her speech were not a conscious attempt to come closer to her subjects, he believed. Rather, social power shifts during the lifetime of the 80-year-old monarch may be responsible.

"We may well be able to relate these sorts of accent changes to changes in the class structure which have taken place in the last 50 years in Britain,"Harrington said.

"Certainly 40 or 50 years ago, Britain was a more socially stratified society. Then there was the giant social revolution in the 1960s. Now we find that there aren't the same divisions between social classes.

"This is also reflected in the blurring of the boundaries within accents,"he explained. So where does this leave the Queen's English?

"I don't suppose too many people now speak the form of the Queen's English as it was spoken in the 1950s," Harrington said.

"But there are certainly still plenty of people who speak the form of English which the queen speaks now."Once digitised, the sovereign's voice was put through a spectral analysis.

"You can find out about vowel resonances, which are most closely linked to the way in which vowels sound. It's very painstaking work," said Harrington, who spent six years studying the broadcasts.

He added: "We want to try and work out what the mechanisms are for sound change and also, for example, how dialects differ.
"How did the American accent become different? With just text and without sound recordings, its difficult to say."He hopes that resulting future work, when more sound recording archives such as that of Quseen Elizabeth become available, should be able to track the evolution of accents over the years to come.

The results were published in the Journal of Phonetics quarterly magazine.

The royal Christmas broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth in which Queen Elizabeth speaks from the heart, a rare occasion where she does not need to seek the advice of her ministers. A Yuletide institution, the 10-minute broadcast is televised on December 25 at 3:00 pm in Britain, as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch.
AFP