Don’t they call that uber-posh form of RP the “Dartmouth accent”, after the Royal Navy’s officer training school? I do notice that British military officers tend to have a very “far back” form of RP, but maybe that’s because half of them already picked it up at Eton, Winchester etc.
And I’ve just noticed that I wrote “their”, above, when it should have been “there”. Gah! I hereby ban myself from pedantic and/or nitpicking posts for one week.
I don’t think so - I’ve never heard the term and Google doesn’t throw up any results (well, except for stuff accents actually from Dartmouth and lots of stuff about tables).
Then I guess we hear things very differently. God, if there are even Londoners who think she doesn’t sound at all American, no wonder many actors don’t bother trying to get the accent right.
I’m not even sure the Queen still speaks like she did when she became Queen. I know, ageing vocal cords etc, but her accent seems less “clipped” nowadays, for want of a better word.
I have heard people use the term, and FWIW get some relevant hits when I google [“dartmouth accent” navy].
With that, I only get ten results and only two of them are relevant. Well, three counting this thread. 
ISTM that it would be a bit unclear using a term that means ‘the accent of the area of Dartmouth’ for ‘really damn posh British,’ since they’re quite different accents.
I think “American” is a good description of what I am hearing. Not as in any recognizable American regional accent, but a less formal, less precise pronounciation of words. Thinking of other actors, Parminda Nagra had it in “Bend it Like Beckham,” but in ER she uses the more formal - RP, I guess.
If you’re going to say that an English born actress of Indian descent , seemingly playing a role of the same origin , is speaking “American” then its so wide as to be virtually meaningless. By that criteria, as I don’t use formal RP, I speak American too.
It doesn’t mean the area around Dartmouth. It means the accent associated with the Dartmouth naval college. I don’t know what search engine you are using, but I see more relevant hits than that, including the following quote: “It was/is a standing joke in the royal navy - the Dartmouth accent. Officer cadets join ship all sounding plummy etc but if you hear them drunk or on phone to parents then they revert to whatever accent they originally had.”
In Bend it Like Beckham, her accent was Estuary English with a hint of her native Leicester.
But it does also mean the accent of the area around Dartmouth - how can it not?
I’m using Google. That quote of yours there is the only properly relevant one I saw at all. Wonder why we’re getting such different results using the exact same terms - perhaps there are lots of pornographic linguistics ones and I have safe search on.
Yeah, that must be it, I’m searching for porn. Thanks for that. That was classy.
Look up the word metonym.
Bye.
Baron Greenback writes:
> I’m not even sure the Queen still speaks like she did when she became Queen.
> I know, ageing vocal cords etc, but her accent seems less “clipped” nowadays,
> for want of a better word.
I’ve seen a description of a study in which someone listened to all of the Queen’s Christmas speeches over her entire reign. It’s apparently possible to chart the slow change in her accent from an old-fashioned sort of RP to a modern form of it. This was done by an expert in phonology, so it was possible to distinguish changes in accent from changes in voice caused by age.
Here’s a news story about this study, which was done by an Australian academic (and the article comes from an Indian news source):
It’s a fairly generic Upper Class-Middle Class accent with it seems to my ears a slight American affectation.
Having now seen the movie, I can say that Emily Blunt’s accent is exactly right for what the character is supposed to be, someone who grew up in a well-off family somewhere around London but who has spent her adult life in the U.S. Since that also describes Blunt herself (well, she spent her adult life in the U.S. and Canada), she didn’t have to change her normal accent at all.
That makes total sense.
Didn’t notice this before. Sorry if it came across like I was saying you were looking for porn - I wouldn’t consider that an insult anyway, but YMMV. I was suggesting it, with a big smiley face, as a possible reason why our results were coming out differently; us having different default levels of safe search wasn’t intended to mean ‘you must be looking for porn.’
For what it’s worth, this Canadian thought “Wow, that’s really a shit attempt at American accent.”
Reads rest of thread/explanation of character.
Okay, I guess… (Most people I know who’ve grown up here have totally normalized accents which I wouldn’t pick out as weird-sounding. Ms. Blunt’s accent istotally unnatural in this clip.)
What? What are you saying? Who are you claiming “grew up here”? If “here” means Canada, then nobody is claiming that either Blunt or her character in the movie grew up there. Blunt grew up in London in a well-off family. In her early twenties she started spending a lot of time in the U.S. and Canada. (She lived with Michael Bublé for several years.) She’s now married to an American and lives in the U.S. To me the accent in the clip sounds like a Brit who now lives in the U.S.