Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
I hope you did not misunderstand me! Perhaps my post came out wrong - I simplified and did not consider how it would sound to a British person. From a Russian perspective, according to themselves, they don't even have accents, and the expression RP is not known outside of Britain, I think. I should have said BBC English though.

I am not proposing that you should speak RP and I don't like the accent snobbery in the UK. Because of this, I retain a slight foreign accent, just to avoid people putting a label on me. My point was, some people in the UK want to change their accent but cannot. It's harder than you might think. A person that was very close to me wanted to speak less RP and more London or Derbyshire. But he simply wasn't able to. His accent was too posh and trying to speak local just made him sound ludicrous. An Indian friend of mine wanted to reduce his Indian accent, and actually took lessons for it! He was a completely fluent English speaker, but he felt that people had a stereotypical view of him because of his accent. Very ambitious person......
I don't accept your premise. Sorry

For one thing, losing one's accent was the done thing for the aspiring middle classes for many many years and many millions of Brits did so successfully while it was the fashionable thing to do, and there are still a good number who do so now in spite of it being generally considered pretentious rather than admirable. We haven't magically lost the ability, only the motivation. Of course there will be examples of people who want to lose their accent and simply can't, but you can't generalise from those specific cases.

Secondly, I don't accept that there is accent snobbery as such any more. Accent snobbery was looking down at people who spoke with regional accents because having such an accent was considered a sign of being working class and uneducated. What we have now is accent rivalry, or accent xenophobia, where people become targets because their accent is out of place or different, not because it's "common".

And thirdly, you need to be sure you're talking about accent and not dialect. You mention "BBC English", but if you watch the BBC nowadays you will hear lots of different accents, some of them quite strong. What you won't [often] hear is regional (non-standard) grammar or vocabulary.

If you speak Scots, did you see the thread where somebody was asking about Robert Burns?
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Hadn't seen it, but have now!