I seriously dislike how Spanish speakers use, or fail to use, the letter "s". I speak Spanish and certain Spanish speakers are incredibly difficult to understand because they drop s's all over the place. Argentinians add the "sh" sound in place of their double "l" ("y") sound. Cubans seem to hate the letter s and leave it out all over the place. And don't get me started with Castillians and their deliberate lisping.

I'm from Manchester... no one I've ever met from the city itself (including older family members) sounds posh, nor have they ever.

19:15 Mongolian throat singing came to mind.

This is so fascinating. When one hears those old newsreels from the 1930s through to the 1950s, they are all old-style RP and they sound ridiculous. I am so glad that Monty Python, the Beatles, and TWTWTW etc killed it off. I can "do" lots of different accents, but I've never been able to do that really nasal version of RP from newsreels. (I can do posh -- you just stretch your lips back over your teeth and try not to move your upper lip, LOL.) Ironically the kids at my comprehensive school thought I was posh because I didn't have a regional accent but I am pretty sure I didn't sound like the upper class twits in the vintage clips you included!

Utterly fascinating!

Ha ha, Kevin.

Would love to see percentage of women with this horrid affectation who are also TikTok addicts.

He did a video on HAY-CH???

As they said in Frasier, every english person sounds posh to an American (and the rest of the world).

A very interesting video and I could well see where it was coming from- and going. However, for me the most important thing is not accent but diction. So many people today mumble so much that it is almost impossible to understand much of what they say.

Interesting video, but I knew within seconds the answer to your question at the beginning, namely, why is this happening? And it is simply that, in the modern West, since the 1960s and in elite circles prior even to that, it has been deemed good, nay, necessary, to invert whatever is old, whatever it is your parents and prior generations thought was good, and to transform it into it something quite the polar opposite. It's true across almost every institution and socially accepted standard of society and, if you ask me, I'm pretty certain it comes from a post-modern, nihilistic self-loathing and existential insecurity (collective loss of belief in God didn't help). As others have remarked, we live in interesting times...perhaps a bit too interesting! So it is not surprising that even the way people speak must yield to the sheer brute force of the dominant ideological milieu.

These videos are always worth watching for a few minutes.

I'm a 20 something American who grew up pronouncing all my Ts and started slowly dropping them over the years. I have no idea why.

Michael Caine and his role in “Alfie “ comes to mind. Wasn’t quite sure what Christine Keeler was up to when I was 10 years old in 1962, now I know just how naughty she was 😊. Thanks 🙏

This whole video must be why Irish accents never annoy me while being less intelligible to me than English accents. For some reason the R swapping just drives me mad if I let myself think about it. 25:55 Is a great example.

As a native American English speaker beginning to learn French, closing in on Dutch fluency, and continuing the arduous task of learning Mandarin, I find these videos extremely helpful to reflect on my native tongue. Merci beaucoup, dankjewel, and xie xie ni.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the effect of the far greater number of "working class" students entering UK universities in the 60's. Was this not a significant factor once they entered the professions?

I remember some 40 years ago being puzzled by Carl Sagan's pronunciation of cosmos. kahz mowss. In my own Australian accent the vowel sound in each syllable is the same.

So, EVERYONE gets this wrong, even Gary Oldman?

There mother

im 26 but i think my accent is old old old :( from Sydney

4:55 Surely dementors need advisers to maximise their potential of swallowing your soul!

An Australian woman at my workplace was pregnant and planned on naming her baby girl Harper only she was telling us she was naming her Hopper. We were all confused and when we finally realized after telling each other Hopper was a strange name for a girl. It made me wonder if she could tell the difference between Harper and Hopper 😅

Hi, sir. you made me question something. i hope u'll answer. Here's my question: As a non-native speaker, should i tryna say sBeech when i say speech?

Gary oldman is such a great actor. It took me a while to figure out that was him, in Oppenheimer.

I think you completely missed that female voices for many are supposed to be melodic and decorative. I think you’ve also missed that women have been scared into trying to make their voices sound lower, because we’re ignored when we use our normal higher pitch. I think you’re looking for complicated answers when the obvious answers are starting you right in the face.

The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens explains why the accent declined, which is basically because a new elite emerged in the 1960s who ridiculed the old elite into oblivion

Am I imagining it or do people from Merseyside and Lancashire sometimes use ejective K word-initially?

I say a lot of things without thinking and still works❤❤🎉🎉

I hate shtreet for street, I know that's not in this video but I hate that. Ya wild animals. It's a freakin street, not a shtreet.

I flap when just chatting casually, but when presenting or having to ensure instructions are clear, I pronounce the 'T'.

These ‘naur’ people are fake aussies anyway. A real Aussie would say ‘nah’.

South African English greeting "howzit!"/"howzit?" (how is it?" for how are you?)

I (American) had to go to speech therapy as a kid to master the rhotic r.

I never knew this was a thing, just thought they had an annoying voice

All of the consonants become vowels if u use their pronounced definition pronouncation Also a e I o u have consonant sounds and vowel sounds X is meaningless So what the heck

Maybe its bcs i am from Germany but i like RP a lot. In my eyes/ears it sounds better.

🇬🇧👑️👑️👑️❤🌹 🌍❤ 💃🖕🕙👀🤗🤗🤝🤝🥰🥰

No idea what any of this means, but perhaps you can solve a mystery for me. Why the Brit use of temporal redundancy? I'll be going to London in three days time, for example. Three days IS time delineated. Is it to differentiate from three days oranges?

Call it Military Conscription, not National Service. Conscripts are not volunteers providing a service.

I recall in university, I had a friend from South America, She said she was surprised she passed the English proficiency test to get in our school. Other than some vowels, that sounded spanish, she was pretty spot on. I asked her why she didn't think she'd pass the test, she said because she never took classes and just learned from watching American TV.

An even greater social change than pronunciation is the growing acceptance of censorship. “Misinformation” or anything which challenges the main stream narrative is censored with self-righteous narcissism.

1:44 this near perfect american accent caught me by suprise wtf

I find it distasteful when otherwise professional people feel the need to pass moral judgement on other peoples preferences . For example, your condemnation of a hypothetical person who doesn’t mind vocal fry men but dislikes it in women. People and society have lots of gendered preferences. Sometimes these preferences serve a clear biological or social function. Other times they seem to be random. Who are you to say that that X gendered preference isn’t morally valid? To pick a particular preference that isn’t clearly anti-social and condemn it, gives you the air of being a bully. It’s similar to one child picking on another for their choice of clothing.

I appreciate the depth and breadth of these lessons and always learn more than expected.

My Grandfather came to Canada from England at the age of 11 in 1909. By the time I came along, the only thing left of his original English accent was an over compensation for his non-rhoticism. I only heard it in one word, father which he pronounced farther.

It's staggers the imagination to realize how few people in the world give a goddamn about this bullshit

You beg to diffah? Perhaps the most important connsonant is "r?"

"Are you being served?"

I am an American native speaker: grew up in Brooklyn, New York; spent most of my adult life in Berkeley, California; now live in Washington, D. C. I definitely do distinguish between ʌ and ə. Words like “above,” “rumpus,” “London,” “butter” have two distinct vowel sounds. I can hear the difference and feel it in my own mouth. The thought would never occur to me that they’re the same sound. The “American” phonetic transcriptions shown in the video like əbəv, rəmpəs, ləndən, bətər strike me as absurd and unpronounceable. One American data point, for what it’s worth.