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 could 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culture and the West End stage in accents that now seem as outdated as the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.