Study: Queen's Accent Moving With The Times

Dec. 22 -- It appears the queen’s English ain’t wot it used to be. A scientific study of Queen Elizabeth II’s accent has found her vowels movingsteadily downmarket.

The study published in Nature magazine found there was a drift in the queen’s accent toward one “characteristic of speakers who are younger and/or lower in the social hierarchy.”

Professor Jonathan Harrington of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues analyzed the vowel sounds from every Christmas broadcast made by Elizabeth from the 1950s through the 1980s. The results showed the trend was toward a middlebrow standard southern British, or SSB, accent, which is widely heard on the BBC.

Using recordings of female BBC broadcasters as their model for a standard southern accent, the team determined the queen’s vowels in her Christmas messages had “moved towards, but not attained,” that accent.

For instance, in the queen’s Christmas broadcasts of the 1950s, the word “had” almost rhymed with “bed.” But 30 years later, “had” was closer to the SSB pronunciation, which rhymes with “bad”.

No one, however, suggests the queen is dropping ’er aitches à la Eliza Doolittle, and she’s unlikely to require the help of a modern-day Professor Henry Higgins.

Decades ago, the queen would spend Christmas at her highbrow haime with her family, with the first vowel sounding similar to that in the word “tame.” Now she is more at home with everyone else — although it’s not the Cockney ’ouse of Windsor — yet.

In fact, as the team admitted, the queen’s diction is still miles apart from SSB in many cases.

“The vowels of the 1980s Christmas messages are still set apart from those of an SSB accent,” the researchers wrote.

Deliberately Downmarket?

But not everyone thinks Her Majesty’s changing speech is a mirror of the changing times.