Re: Language change among immortals

Dirk Elzinga wrote:
> On 11/21/05, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> >
> > Personally I feel it takes quite a jolt for a person's language to
> > change
> > noticeable [correction: noticeably :-( ] within their lifetime.
> > (Excluding emigration to a foreign
> > country, of course.) The principal factor would be exposure to a dialect
> > that is perceived as more prestigious than one's own.
> >
>
> I was waiting for this to come up :-). There is a short article in the
> journal Nature from 2000 which reports on the changing pronunciation
> of Queen Elizabeth between the 1950s and 1980s. Basically, her vowels
> are moving towards what the article calls  "Standard Southern
> British". The URL is
> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6815/abs/408927a0.html .
> (Hmmm. This may be subscription-only (I'm looking at if from work); if
> it is, I have the PDF and would be happy to send it to interested
> persons.)
I think the abstract is sufficient. (But why did they stop at the 1980s?)
The Queen will soon be 80 (that's 800 in terms of Kutsuwamushi's 1000-yr.
immortals) and has personal/political reasons to retain her popularity, and
to retain the respect of, and remain in communication with, her subjects--
most of whom belong to at least 2 new generations and have grown up in a
world very different from the one she grew up in. So, consciously or not,
she moderates somewhat the accent she grew up with. If she didn't, she'd
probably find herself considered totally irrelevant and out of touch, and
the butt of jokes (Upper Class Twit of the Year etc.). One wonders how many
elderly members of the House of Lords have changed their accents? They'd
have little reason to, IMO.

Perhaps the Queen has become a little bit bi-dialectal; it would be
interesting to eavesdrop on her non-public conversation with relatives and
social peers.....

I now see that "prestigious" wasn't quite the right word, though it fits in
many cases; "normative [for a given region/occupation/status]" might have
been more accurate.