Theorists

• Giles Matched Guise experiment - RP (received pronunciation)


  • Seen as the most intelligent and prestigious
• Giles matched guise experiment - Regional accents


  • Seen as friendlier or more honest
  • Brummie accent ranked bottom for intelligence
• Giles' Capital Punishment experiment


  • Five groups of students given the same script (four oral and one written). All spoke in a different accent: RP, Somerset, Welsh and Brummie. RP was rated highly in competency and reliability, but was rated low in persuasiveness and was seen as 'posh and snobby'.
• Linda Mugglestone - RP's prestige is on the wane
• Jonathan Harrington - Queen's accent over 50 years of her Christmas speeches has started to move towards a general Southern English accent. This has been done via her interactions with people who don’t speak RP and a gradual reduction in her accent.
• George Osbourne as Chancellor


  Dropped his RP accent and used an accent closer to Estuary English when speaking to workers. He used things like ‘kinda’ and ‘Briddish’ instead of ‘kind of’ and ‘British’. He was seen to be using his RP again in Parliament.
• Giles and Powesland speaker


  • had a speaker who delivered a talk about psychology to two sets of students. One set had the talk performed with an RP accent and the other had the talk performed with a Brummie accent. The group voted the RP speaker as higher saying that the Brummie was less intelligent.
• University of Aberdeen - conducted a study of jokes, Brummie accent often the funniest and RP the unfunniest
• Worcester College played participants clips from a police interview. Brummie suspects were significantly more likely to labelled as guilty. Participants labelled the Brummie accent as more likely to be poor and working class.
• Peter Trudgill - Traditional dialects


  • Use 'old' and often rural lexemes and grammatical constructions. Through a process called lexical attrition, these traditional dialectal words are dying out
• Peter Trudgill - Mainstream dialects


  • More common lexical and grammatical constructions, used by a majority within a geographical area
• David Rosemwarne


  • coined the term ‘Estuary English’ (occasionally called ‘London Regional General British’) to describe the variation that arose from around the Thames Estuary.
  • This is defined as the mix of RP and Cockney.
• • Estuary English acts, as Paul Coggle suggests, as a bridge between Cockney and RP speakers and so serves as a bridge between the classes in South East England.
  • In addition, Estuary English has spread all over the UK with there being speakers with EE elements spotted as far away as Glasgow.
• AC Gimson (1962)


  Argued that there were times that RP could be a decided disadvantage, especially in social situations where empathy and affection are needed.
• Peter Trudgill has investigated variations in relationship to show variations of in class and regional forms. The triangle shows that as social class decreases, regional variation increases.
• Paul Kerswill believes that within 30 years, MLE will replace Cockney completely.