Помогите перевести срочно нужно We want to talk proper. (SO DO WE).
Why so many British people are taking elocution lessons?
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 cliché for brutality, arrogance and stupidity. Consumers no longer see it as a sign of trustworthiness and authority. Peter Trudgill, 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.
And RP has evolved. Today's version is closer to accents that once would have been termed plebeian. The Queen Mother spoke differently from the way her daughter talks. Princess Diana's speech was different again—closer to the generalised southern accent sometimes called “Estuary English”. Modern RP includes, for example, some glottal stops (an illustration is “Gatwick” pronounced without the “t”).
Yet annoyingly for the egalitarians who believe that all kinds of accent are equally beautiful and useful—there is a large and growing demand for “better” speech. Ann Jones, the general secretary of the Society of Teachers of Speech and Drama, estimates that more than 10,000 people take elocution lessons every year. “In the last five or six years it's really taken off,” she says. Her members (who call themselves speech trainers, rather than elocution teachers, a term regarded as very dated) have as much work they want. The director of the London Language and Drama School, Sarah Mann, says that all speech training courses are fully subscribed.
This is not a reprise of Shaw's “Pygmalion”. Most people signing up for lessons are not trying to learn classic RP, but to make their verbal skills match their other business tools—such as the visuals on a slide presentation. A typical aim is to soften or dilute regional accents to the point that they will be readily understood by people from elsewhere. Ms Mann says that it can take as little as six one-hour lessons to help a motivated student to replace glottal stops with “t”s in words like “water”, and to insert a missing “l” into words such as “old”, “cold” and “gold”.

She does not necessarily try to eliminate regional accents, she insists, so long as the speaker learns to eliminate “lazy” speech such as slurring, and annoying verbal tics, such as “know what I mean”, “sort of”, or “like”. “You can get away with even quite a marked accent if you are an interesting enough speaker, with pitch and pace and pause in your delivery,” she says.
There is a strong business case for all this. A survey of company directors (see chart) by the Aziz Corporation, which calls itself the country's leading independent spoken communications consultancy, says that 31% reckon that a strong regional accent is a disadvantage in business.
But why the growth in demand? One reason is globalisation. Foreigners typically learn RP, or something like it, and are often mystified by Britain's stronger regional dialects. Dealing with them means speaking some sort of standard English.
A second reason is the growing emphasis on better presentation skills in business. Managers who are willing to lavish money on public relations, speech writers, coaches and so on are more likely to want their Ps and Qs fixed too.
A third reason is the erosion of boundaries within companies. Jayne Comins, a speech coach in London, notices a big increase in clients with a computing background. “Talking's not what they are really about,” she says. “A lot of men in IT didn't start out wanting a job working with people, but when they become successful they often have to talk at board meetings, give presentations and sell their product.”