Are regional accents in English becoming a marker of class, as opposed to region?
Accent change is complicated. There’s one trend that is like that, and another trend that is not. Three things have happened to accents in the course of the last century. One is that the originally prestige accent, Received Pronunciation (RP) – the posh accent – of England. The one that we make fun of in Australia. The one you make fun of in Australia, that’s right. That has virtually disappeared. It hasn’t entirely. It’s still being used by the Queen and so on, but less than 2% of the population of England use it nowadays and it’s on the way out. And it’s changing its phonetic character because of the SECOND trend. That is the growth of a more homogenised accent – Estuary English, as some people call it – a more downmarket variety of pronunciation, which has swept over a very large proportion of the country. This has affected all kinds of vowels that are used, traditionally, in RP. You hear it on the radio these days all the time. You will never hear the old pronunciation of RP, where
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