ABSTRACT
This study is about the changes that have taken place in the last 50 years to one variety of English, Received Pronunciation (RP), the so-called standard accent of Britain. It is also about defining some of the pronunciation characteristics of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Close to the time of writing, Professor John Laver CBE has accepted the Queen’s Anniversary Prize, on behalf of Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, for its pioneering contributions to speech science. Just over 2 years before this, in a thoughtful and well-reasoned article on a paper we had just published entitled ‘Does the Queen still speak the Queen’s English’, Philip Hensher, writing in The Independent, 1 noted that our study could hardly seem anything but disrespectful to the point of lèse-majesté, whereas The Times, 2 labelling us as ‘three Australian phoneticists’ [sic] in its editorial of December 21st, 2000, entitled ‘Our Common Queen: Rougher Talk from her Majesty,’ thundered the following: ‘We are not amused—oh no we ain’t.’ We feel, then, that we have a duty to explain our motives for going down this potentially treacherous research path.
