A final language (and Christmas!) related posting for 2006:
The Telegraph newspaper is reporting on an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts to the Commonwealth since 1952 which shows that over the years, the Queen’s English has become less posh. The article begins: “As the common tongue continues its inexorable slide towards a new dark age of glottal stops and “innits”, news comes that even the Queen is drifting slowly down river towards Estuary English.”
Between 1952 and 2006, the royal vowel sounds have slowly shifted from the upper class Upper Received Pronunciation towards the more democratic Standard Received Pronunciation.
“In 1952 she would have been heard referring to ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. Similarly, she would have spoken of the citay and dutay, rather than citee and dutee, and hame rather than home In the 1950s she would have been lorst, but by the 1970s lost.”
The original research paper by Jonathan Harrington, published in the Journal of Phonetics Vol. 34, Issue 4, Oct. 2006, is called An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts.
UBC Library subscribes to the Journal of Phonetics online – read the full article here. You can also listen for yourself by viewing the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts in these short video clips from 1958, 1975, and 2006.
The Queen now has a podcast! If you’d like to hear more of the Queen’s speeches, simply sign up for the Royal podcast by following the instructions here.