Your isolated Rs are lovely, Dr. Geoff. They sound rather rural.

Rp is still practiced in some areas of antiquity..... step forward Reese-Mogg and your ilk. Fortunately I rarely heard it in every-day life, growing up in the 50s and 60s in Scotland.

An observation that may got Graham Chapman a reprieve; I have heard Americans change words that end with schwa, like agenda and idea, to a somewhat mocking, emphasized, "r", sound at the end. ie someone might change the common, "What's the big idea?", to, "What's the big idEER?" (I am now thinking that that may be when it rhymes like, "What's the idEER, 'round hERE?")

I've watched many of your interesting videos but didn't bother to finish this as it is not one of them! Your title comment that "people hate vocal fry" is just simply wrong as demonstrated by your essay! If it is used a lot then people simply do not "hate" it.

There are other words like covert that are spelled with o but originally had a u vowel, like conduit, bombast and dromedary, because English was often influenced by French spelling conventions, and French often used o to spell its u sound. This applied to some native English words too, like love, come, some. These words never had an o vowel in English (as opposed to words like mother and brother, which did once have a long o which raised to long u and then shortened). Because words like conduit are more likely to be encountered first while reading rather than speech, their pronunciations have adjusted to their spelling, like covert (adj.), while common words like love, some and come are heard enough before being read that their pronunciations are not influenced by their spelling. Whenever people try to argue in favor of a pronunciation based on spelling, I have to wonder how far they would apply that consistently.

I'm sure humans around the world have been classifying and mocking one another based on speech patterns since pre-historical times. But you Brits seem to have crafted accent-based discrimination into something of a national sport.

I spot the spelling mistake in "practice critical thinking..." -- practice is a noun, it should be practise with an S. That people are forgetting how to spell is terrible, etc, etc, etc.

I'm not so concerned about vocal fry but it would be nice if young people stopped injecting "like" in every sentence. That was how the beatniks spoke and the practice should have died out a long time ago.

Charles modelled himself on Mountbatten (the man who thought he won the war) in every respect…including how he speaks.

First time I've heard somebody explaining why many Americans say shtr... for str .... or even acknowledging the phenomenon, for that matter. I think it's a recent development ... and it damages my ears.

excellent talkie

VOCAL FRY AND RACE/ETHNICITY? Hello, something that was not addressed in your video is race: is there any correlation between use of vocal fry and race? I have a feeling that it is a phenomenon, if not exclusive, predominant in white groups. In fact, as a foreigner, who has difficulty doing this, it becomes perhaps more clear that this is a distinctive trace to set apart native English speakers, especially of America origin, from others. I mean: you can even get the grammar and the pronunciation right, but can you fry? If you can, you're definitely native. But there is yet another aspect: I can not recall seeing black Americans frying. You find that also among Asian (women, mostly), but do African Americans do it too? Isn't it also about ethnic differentiation?

Ouch! I have never felt so convicted by a UKposts video. Straight through my right-wrong-absolutist heart. 😢😢😭🙈😂

And anyway, what are these 'authoritarian governments on both the right and left' trying to 'stamp out non-standard forms'? Are you still talking about language there? I don't think there is *any* government, however 'non-authoritarian' it may be, which doesn't try to teach *some* standard language in its educational system and to use it in its administration.

"a tap of the tongue tip just behind the upper front teeth" is such a nice phrase

Pronouncing lonzherAY is not only a fail at imitation the French pronunciation, it's also a fail at following the normal rules of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in English itself: final E in loans from French may be pronounced AY (albeit normally with an accent on top), but final IE never is. Yes, there's always a 'logic' of some kind behind every mistake, but that doesn't mean it should be approved of while spreading; especially when the change itself is clearly driven by hypercorrection - i.e. precisely by a failed attempt at being 'right'. And of course British people have borrowed this historically and orthographically illogical pronunciation from Americans, because they are generally sure that Americans are right about everything. Again, if a change is motivated by such a thing, it is hardly to be welcomed with open arms. Personally, I intend to keep saying londjerY as long as there are any native speakers left who do.

I'm American and before I knew anything about linguistics I learned to tell Northern and Southern English speakers apart by how Northerners pronounce short-u as the vowel in "book"

When I was at college learning speech and language therapy I was fairly surprised to discovered that the rest of my class produced ‘s’ with the tongue tip raised. I made it with the tip low behind my lower teeth (probably because as a part of my long orthodontic treatment I had a physical bar between my top canines). However, there was no audible difference between my ‘s’ and my classmates. When correcting lispers, particularly those who had open bites due to thumb sucking, I often found they produced a more natural ‘s’ if they dropped the tongue tip down than trying to hold it behind upper teeth that weren’t in the correct position. They also learned to do it more quickly and reliably.

Pronounce the word how it’s spelled? Thats crazy!

Th in þink is not the same as ðe th in ðis

Not as good as Guy Pierce's. He can do posh well and Northern better.

I think my favourite bugbear is people correcting a mistake with insufficient explanation or misunderstanding why. Like "Don't say 'Me and Alice' went to the shops, say 'Alice and I,' you should put the other person first and say 'I'." STAHP telling people that. First of all that's 2 separate corrections and everyone now thinks they're connected. That I is correct when it comes after the other person. Secondly, this doesn't pick up all of the related mistakes when people say her/him instead of she/he. And simultaneously people vastly overcorrect under the impression that any time you're describing someone else and yourself, you should use "I". It's now a regular occurrence to see not only "Bob came to the shops with Alice and I" but even "Alice and I's trip to the shops." (To say nothing of "Alice and I went to the shops: her and I needed some groceries.") And there's a much simpler and pretty much accurate rule that you could use to correct people: imagine the sentence without the other person, and use whichever pronoun you would use in that case. "I went to the shops." "Bob came to the shops with me." "My trip to the shops." "Alice went to the shops: she needed some groceries." I try not to mention it unless the discussion has already arisen because this is probably going to become perfectly acceptable usage and I need to lump it. But "Alice and I's" in particular drives me bonkers.

Neither - I say these words correctly: ty-ub and ty-use-day (sorry I don't know the correct phonetic signs for these sounds); I only say "toob" if I'm taking the Michael out of Americans lol.

In the Southwest of England, we richly and roundly pronounce our letter 'r'; thus "law" and "lore" are distinct.

In other words, the king is a ridiculous, out-of-date caricature-character from an annoying Australian sitcom about the British.

The problem with pronouncing 'mischievious' is that this presupposes a *spelling* 'mischievious'. You can campaign for the recognition of the *spelling* 'mischievious' as correct. But pronouncing 'mischievious' while still writing 'mischievous' just introduces more chaos into the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. English spelling is chaotic, but it doesn't have this particular crazy pattern (yet). And more chaos isn't a good thing, especially in the relationship between spelling and pronunciation - after all, since people *are* required to master spelling, that shouldn't be made more difficult than necessary. English 'liberalism' when it comes to pronunciation is combined with a spelling that is as arbitrary and despotic to the population as Caligula.

My friend has a lisp. She puts her tongue BETWEEN her teeth instead of behind when pronouncing S. It's just a bad habit. I told her to keep her teeth together when pronouncing S and she did it just fine without a lisp. But she doesn't make a mental effort to get rid of the bad habit so she still has a lisp 😂

I'm so grateful to stop bludgeoning my own good sense to get myself to believe what you reveal here to be outdated and, from their very inception, inaccurate symbols.

Dr Geoff, can you please make a video on the correct way of pronouncing the name "Harry," so it doesn't sound like "hairy" and things like that? Thank you!

Wild that Aussies are taught to mispronounce words on purpose.

ROFL The end was fantastic! "That's All!"

Hi! I love your channel. I have a question about grammar: why is "stood" replacing "standing"? And when did that start. For example"If you are stood on the beach and looking at the horizon." This feels like passive voice. I'm from Croatia, we have different verb tenses.

'Lawnzheray' makes my shit itch almost as much as 'chaise lounge'.

I considered the BBC World Service's discontinuation of standard-pronunciation news-readers 20 or so years ago as a terrible choice. I had enjoyed that sound. Some of the successor-accents were quite horrible.

Like so much in nature, language is just bastardisations all the way down. Down with the Tyranny of the Discontinuous mind!

If you wanted to be a professional reporter in the Netherlands you really needed to know your Dutch... a degree would have been good. Sadly, the last 25 years, anything goes.

Could it be said that RP died with the Empire? If those who were in charge of the entire world are no longer in charge then, why emulate them?

Thank you for this video. I noticed this gradual change visiting the United States and Canada frequently particularly in speakers under 25. Always wanted to know more about it!

A number of times you say "In words like..." when you ought to say "In words such as...".

And?...

"A win for the team I happen to be on" is a great observation, haha.

As someone who’s working class I quite resent posh people trying to talk like me….

I had to come back to this video because I realised that I say 'asbestos' with an aspiration so basically 'aspestos'. Am I saying it wrong or is the opposite phenomenom happening here?

Nowadays everyone just sounds like a ree terd.

That may have legitimately been one of the best ad segues I’ve ever seen

But you always refuse to engage with the argument that "expert linguists" do not control our culture and society. There are sociocultural factors beyond linguistics - and they are relevant to the extent that they are seen as relevant. These sociocultural factors have nothing to do with the linguistic science Lindsey is expert in and he should not pretend that his linguistic knowledge means that he can pronounce that there is no such thing as a standard language or standard pronunciation. Sociocultural factors are to some extent arbitrary, but that does not mean we don't have a culture that is being passed on to the next generation.

I wouldn't exactly describe Sean Connery's James Bond accent as "scottish working class" He was hardly channeling Billy Connolly

When Dr. Lindsey set the quiz, I thought what was coming was an analysis of accident data from left-driving vs. right-driving countries. That didn't happen. Likewise, when I listened to the video, I thought at times that Dr. Lindsey was confessing to addressing with contempt the speech of those he doesn't like (ie, the posh, as he did a few videos ago). But no, those educated folk who think they are superior are not him but other people....

I always thought of "mischievious" as a portmanteau of mischievous and devious

I as a foreigner who's never been to Britain and has no idea of the British classes do find T glottaling vulgar and even repulsing.