Deepening or lessening the divide between diphthongs : an analysis of the Queen's annual Christmas broadcasts

1. Introduction This study is about the changes that have taken place in the last fifty years to one variety of English, Received Pronunciation (RP), the so-called standard accent of Britain. It is also about defining some of the pronunciation characteristics of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Close to the time of writing, Professor John Laver CBE has accepted The Queen's Anniversary Prize, on behalf of Queen Margaret University College Edinburgh for its pioneering contributions to speech science. Just over two years before this, in a thoughtful and well-reasoned article on a paper we had just published entitled 'Does the Queen still speak the Queen's English', Philip Hensher writing in The Independent 1 noted that our study could hardly seem anything but disrespectful to the point of lèse-majesté, while The Times 2 , labelling us as 'three Australian phoneticists' (sic) in its Editorial of December 21 st 2000 entitled 'Our Common Queen: Rougher Talk from her Majesty' thundered: 'We are not amused — oh no we ain't.' We feel, then, that we have a duty to explain our motives for going down this potentially treacherous research path. Part of the answer is to be found in the multiple strands of speaker characteristics and variability that have been so carefully documented and modelled by John Laver in his many writings on 2 these subjects over the last thirty years. As discussed in both that define the characteristics of a speaker are due to considerably more than the anatomical and physiological properties of the vocal organs (although these of course play a considerable role as well). Within the same speaker there can be variations along a number of dimensions. The formality of speaking style can vary resulting in a greater or lesser tendency to reduce and assimilate speech. There can be variation in the paralinguistic tone of voice in which the loudness, pitch and segment duration can change according to a speaker's mood and emotional state. Articulatory settings can vary between speakers: there may be short-term differences, as in the tendency for some speakers of British English Received Pronunciation (RP) to produce /s/ with lip-rounding (Laver, 1994); or there may be long-term effects if, for example, a speaker habitually produces speech with hyponasality. Beyond these issues, there are the well-known differences in speakers due to dialect and social status, a factor that is especially relevant to the standard accent of England, Received …