RP up to World War II

Varieties of English are as old as the language itself in fact the idea of a correct or proper way to speak is surprisingly recent. There is such an idea of course; it is often referred to as the Queen’s English, BBC English or Oxford English or Public School English.

Public school English is barely a hundred years old. In first round the playing fields of schools like Eton, Harrow and Winchester.

In Victorian England these boarding schools took boys from many backgrounds and gave them the same accent.

You have a kind of unnatural segregation if a subset of people of the country the very people who are going to become the most powerful. Because of their position of power they were the basis of imitation. They were eminent and eminently imitable, as it were.

The presume superiority of this accent lingers. Research in Britain shows that people using this accent are thought more intelligent, more trustworthy, even better looking. Its influence its declining but the inculcation of public school English still goes on in schools like Winchester.

Undoubtedly, the English public schools have set an enormous influence on the dissemination of one variety of English, what I call the super dialect that is, received Standard, or BBC English, or public school English, whatever you call it but it’s only spoken bi one in fifty people in this country, something of that sort.

The invention of the wireless turned public school English into BBC English. The radio did for the spoken language what printing ha d done for the written. Listeners couls heard for the first time a definitive English speech, the voice of information, culture and the West End stage in accents that now seem as outdated as the clothes.

World War II was the finest hour for BBC English, the voice of Britain resounding with authority and defiance. When the war broke out, I happened to be in Wellington, New Zeland. I heard Neville Chamberlain speak but the announcer to me was just as important as Neville Chamberlain, which really is some quite extraordinary equation.

They used to stand alone like some great isolated supreme power of language, that what it said was both correctly said and was the truth.