RP is the sound of a truly classless Britain

I love regional accents, but we shouldn’t need a new gadget from Amazon to understand each other

One of my unexpected duties when I worked for British Rail in the mid-eighties was to act as the interpreter between the Geordie who sat opposite me and the Teesider who sat beside me.

“Wass ’ee sayin?” each would ask, unable to grasp each other’s accent, in spite of coming from cities just 30 miles apart. I, who had lived most of my life in Kent, and whose knowledge of the accents of northeastern England was limited to once watching an episode of The Likely Lads, just had to do my best.

How much easier life would have been had I had access to an invention which Amazon has just patented: a computer that can learn regional accents and convert spoken words into a form more likely to be understood by a listener from another part of the country. So my Geordie colleague could have called the chap from Teeside and heard him as if he, too, were speaking with a Geordie accent.

In future, we will all be able to call those bank call centres based in Glasgow and at least have a faint clue as to what is happening to our money. As for Glaswegian readers, before you write in to complain, you might in future be able to understand Eastenders, should you wish to.

But I have a sense of foreboding, and not just because the enthusiasm for such technology tends to run well ahead of its competence, as anyone who has used Google Translate can attest. What if, as a result of the Amazon device, the BBC and other organisations decide to give up on Received Pronunciation (RP) once and for all?

I love to hear regional accents, those of South Wales especially. Up in the hills the other week, it made my day to have conversations that could have come straight out of Under Milk Wood.

My favourite was coming across a girl with two pieces of tissue paper stuffed up her nose. When I stopped to ask her if she was OK, whether she had a nose bleed, she replied in a wonderful South Welsh lilt: “No, I’m just a bit snotty.”

But there is something rather attractive, too, about RP. I know that for some people it comes across as a bit snotty – in a different sense. But the point about RP is that it is classless.

Posh people have always had their own accents, interpreting “hound” as “hind”, “out and about” as “ite ’n abite”.

RP, by contrast, by definition tries to free itself from affectations. It evolved, in public schools and then in the BBC, specifically to disguise the regional and class origin of a speaker in order that they could be understood throughout the country. This was especially important with radio, where the listener cannot read the lips of the speaker – an important part of understanding speech even among people with good hearing.

RP was the equivalent of having one standard time for the whole of Britain – something that did not exist before the railway system was developed. Few would want to go back to having clocks in Bristol set 10 minutes behind those in London.

Yet RP has been under pressure ever since the BBC discovered regional accents in the Seventies and decided that it would be more inclusive to champion them.

One of the early results was the political editor John Cole, who was let loose on the screens without elocution lessons and whose reports from Westminster during the Eighties were famously lampooned in Private Eye for being incomprehensible to anyone outside Ulster.

Now, reverse snobbery seems to dictate that we are all expected to speak in some kind of regional accent – even the many of us who don’t come from any particular place.

It reached the heights of silliness when George Osborne, who normally has a fine voice, started trying to deliver speeches from the Dispatch Box with glottal stops and other features of Estuary English. He was presumably trying to curry favour with ordinary voters, though it didn’t seem to occur to him that, if it impressed anyone, it would only have been those from the South East.

Regional accents are great to hear when you walk into a pub, but not so good when you want to speak to the entire country. I would sooner we rediscover RP than use Amazon’s gizmo as an excuse for broadcasters, politicians and others to slump back into regional drawl.