Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
Interesting that she was able to switch between Surgik and Russian. If you take people in the UK who speak in an accent, they cannot just switch it off and speak Queen's English - only if they had training in speaking "accentless".
Why would they want to? The stigma associated with regional accents hasn't really existed for many, many decades, and learning RP went out of fashion shorty after the war and sounds totally absurd to any modern ears (at least ears not belonging to a person named Windsor). It's not that Brits are incapable of speaking "neutral" English, rather it's become generally accepted that there is no such thing as "neutral English" in the first place - no one geographical area or social caste has any more right to claim ownership over the language than any other.

That's not to say that we don't modulate our accents depending on the context, of course we do, but knocking the edge of an accent for the sake of communication isn't the same as trying to hide it.

I grew up speaking Scots at home, then when I started school I was punished, occasionally even beaten, for using anything other than standard English because back then Scots was considered by the British establishment to be a degenerate, vulgar form of regional English rather than a language in its own right as is the case today. Imagine, being beaten for using the language of Robert Burns in a school not 50 miles from where he lived and wrote! So you can be damn sure I and my fellow students learned to code-switch automatically at a pretty young age, speaking Scots amongst ourselves and at home and speaking Scottish Standard English while in school or whenever we found ourselves outwith our local area.

And I still do so today. I've been away from my local area for twenty years and away from Scotland for ten so the edges have certainly been knocked off my accent, but sit me down in my old local with a group of my old friends and within a few minutes I'll be unintelligible to anyone born more than 5 miles away.