Even the Queen of England no longer speaks the Queen’s English. A comparison
of Christmas messages she broadcast in the 1950s and the 1980s has shown that
her accent has drifted towards a standard southern British accent typical of
younger, lower-class speakers, with subtle cockney influences (Nature,
vol 408, p 927). Team leader Jonathan Harrington of Macquarie University in
Sydney concludes that any attempt to defend pronunciation against social change
is “as unlikely as King Canute’s attempts to defeat the tides”.
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