ABSTRACT
Peter Trudgill is a leading sociolinguist who has written extensively on the attitudes of the general population to speech. Here he discusses the current changes he has detected in the public perception of various British English regional and social varieties, dealing not only with traditional Received Pronunciation (as his own title would suggest), but also taking in developments in a wide range of local accents, and what he considers to be the ‘myth’ of Estuary English.
