VOICE SQUAD

Mian Ridge on the special coaches

who are helping people to get rid of their posh accents

'YOU are scared to let your voice out because you don't want to show your feelings, a mellifluous voice tells me as I settle back in my chair. 'This makes it a little thin. And your vowels are pinched. Pinched vowels mean that you are speaking for tone and not for warmth. Tone is for authority, for ruling.'

These are the words of Valentine Palmer, a voice coach. He would once have been called an elocution teacher, but that term is now out of date, suggesting, as it does, the coaching of Received Pronunciation and perfect, rounded vowels. Valentine spends much of his time doing something very different: helping people soften what linguists call URP (Upper Received Pronunciation, aka 'speaking posh') into a neutral-sounding, classless accent. Intrigued by this phenomenon and, as the daughter of URP speakers, unsure of the status of my own voice, I have come to find out more.

'As class barriers continue to break down, so there is a levelling off of accents,' Valentine says. 'Within the next 20 to 30 years, the plummy voice will have ceased to exist.' But in the meantime many people are making a conscious effort to moderate an upper-class accent. The first thing they normally do is to try to stop drawing out their vowels — drawling — and they might stop saying "yah" for "yes". But many need professional help.'

One of them, in Valentine's opinion, is Tony Blair. 'His voice has too much tone and not enough warmth,' he says. 'He needs to slow down, for a start, but people would warm to him more if he actually spoke with warmth — it makes the most incredible difference.'

Although I have strains of what Valentino calls a 'privileged' accent, my vowels are confused. Pinched and at times a bit long, my pronunciation of some — 'o' for example — is pure Estuary English (known in the business as EE). This means that I say, 'Ow, really? instead of a nice clean 'Oh, really?'

Estuary English is a confusing term because it refers to a wider area than its name suggests. Coined in 1984, it is taken to mean the popular speech of south-east Eng land itself based on the speech of London — somewhere between broad Cockney and Received Pronunciation. There are a million shades in-between, and most of us are infected by it, even if very subtly. Almost every one of my generation, and many of my parents'

— though not of my grandparents' — shares its most common characteristic, the glottal stop. You might manage to resist the odd innit?-, but you may well soften or omit the 'I' in 'isn't it?". Valentine points out that when I say 'it seems', I pronounce the T only very softly, if at all.

Speakers of Estuary English are also fond of the word 'basically', and tend to add tags to their conversation ('don't I?'). Transforming the 't' at the beginning of a word to a 'ch' sound is also common (Tuesday', for example, sounds more like 'chooseday'). Someone with a more pronounced Estuary accent will insert a sound like 'w' next to an '1' (so 'milk' sounds like `miwk'). But, unlike Cockney, Estuary uses standard grammar and doesn't drop its aitches or replace 'th' with f or 'V ("and on 'cart, Muvver').

Although it's been hailed as some revolutionary new way of speaking, there's nothing very new about Estuary English. London has always been the main source of linguistic trends. What is revolutionary is such a widespread adoption by the upper classes of a downmarket accent. In the past people have adjusted their accents downwards in line with fashion — in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, a Liverpool accent was a coveted accesso iy but never on such a large scale. 'What is new is that people feel social pressure to bring their voices down,' says John Wells, professor of phonetics at University College, London.

While the young may embrace a stronger version of Estuary, a subtle adoption of it is more common. Hence the creation of the neutral-sounding accent — placeless, classless; an unprecedented linguistic phenomenon. This accent obscures origins, which is its attraction. It is seen to lend street cred, to project an approachable, upfront image. There's dearly a perception that it is the mode of speech for the real movers and shakers. It is the accent of the aspiring, just as Received Pronunciation once was.

`In the business world, if you want the guy to sign the cheque, you want to sound acceptable,' says Valentine. 'A neutral accent is safe; you can't offend anyone with it.' But where does this leave regional accents? A regional accent may not be mocked as openly as a plummy voice is, but the old stereotypes still persist. Valentine says that he sees more people than ever wanting to lose or soften a strong brogue — or their employers paying for them to do so.

Regional accents may have had something of a revival in music and on television, but all too often this has served only to reinforce the stereotypes. While a gentle, lowland Scottish accent is the voice of education and authority on television — giving us the news and selling us life insurance — a stronger accent is packaged quite differently. Think of hard Glaswegian criminals in police dramas. How often do you hear a Brummy accent in a commercial, unless it's a joke? Considered in this light, accents have become celebrated more as whims of fashion or farce than for their diversity.

So it should come as no surprise that linguists have detected strains of Estuary English in Liverpool schools, or that accents are levelling out in every corner of Britain. Thanks to modern transport, television and the loss of small, self-contained rural networks, town-to-town dialects merged into vague regional accents decades ago.

A few small signs still remain that Britain was once a nation in which rich local dialects and cultures thrived. A slice of Lottery money has recently been awarded to a project in the Forest of Dean which will record the ancient dialect known as 'Forest', preserved since the 17th century because of the area's geographical isolation between the Severn and the Wye. But it is about to slip away with the last generation that is still speaking it.

What is to be gained from the trend towards a neutral, classless accent, if all it does is replace one standard with another, impose a new order to which everyone must conform to pass muster? We really will be living in Bland Britannia.