Luke Thompson

especially when I make an effort to be very clear and I pronounce every T in every word and I don't drop sounds and things like that.

Let's just call that... Let's plant a flag there and call that RP.

All right, so you've got that.

Then there's Cockney.

And these are the two major ones, right?

So you've got sort of a...

this more educated accent, and then Cockney, which is traditionally associated with sort of a less educated class.

Now, I don't make any value judgment about that whatsoever, but that's generally the way it goes.

You know, whenever you talk about English or British culture, you end up talking about the class system, because although arguably it doesn't exist anymore, although it probably still does, it was a clear way of understanding the hierarchy in class.

British society was that there was a clear upper class, middle class, lower class.

And you can understand that in terms of accents as well, that the lower class tended and perhaps still do tend to speak with clear regional accents.

And a regional accent that we associate with London is generally called Cockney.

Although Cockney is traditionally associated with a certain region in the east of the city.

And in, for example, West London, somewhere like Shepherd's Bush, 50 years ago, when I think regional accents were a lot stronger...

Had its own thing as well.

It wasn't Cockney.

Anyway, let's just call Cockney a sort of standard sort of, I don't know, working class London accent, let's say.

Although I'm a bit reluctant to use class as a distinction because you could probably find some people who in some ways are closer to an upper class sort of cohort.

in their lifestyle and in the, in terms of their bank balance and yet still speak with a Cockney accent.

So you get some people who are really rich, you know, some even people who are in the establishment of,