Now that Britain's public-school elite is in retreat, is the way it talks disappearing too? For years social levellers have been celebrating the decline of Received Pronunciation (RP), the clipped, cut-glass way of talking often known as Oxford, or BBC, English. Once the confident accent of the ruling class, it is now, supposedly, the dying dialect of an enfeebled tribe, attracting suspicion and contempt rather than deference and respect. But it's not as simple as that. Certainly, RP, as it once was, no longer rules. The BBC goes out of its way to use regional accents; in Hollywood, a posh British accent is a cliche for brutality, arrogance and stupidity. Consumers no longer see it as a sign of trustworthiness and authority. Peter Trud-gill, a leading socio-linguist, says that some call-centres prefer regional accents to RP because of the negative reactions RP arouses. Although there is little solid research, linguists think that RP speakers may have fallen from 5% of the population to less than 3%. "There may well be more RP speakers abroad than here," says David Crystal, the country's best-known authority on the English language.
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