Luke Thompson

I think you call it standard Southern British English.

Yeah.

which is just, you could argue that it's a sort of neutral form of English.

Whether it really is neutral is another question because, you know, just go north in England and it's not really, in the north, they won't argue that southern British English is the neutral form because, you know, it's not really fair to everyone north of wherever it is, like the Midlands.

But there's always a spectrum within these distinctions that you've talked about, which is a really important thing to remember.

It's not like cut and dry, just simple four basic forms, but there's a lot of sort of intermingling and a lot of code switching where people will adapt their accents depending on the situation.

Individuals have fluid accents, but we can sort of roughly...

I'm just thinking of my audience at this point who are out there in the world, you know, trying to learn English.

And I guess an important thing to say for them is that, well, what accent should they be trying to have?

And what's the difference between the accent that you try to acquire and

in the language you're learning and just being aware of the many different accents that you will encounter when you're talking to people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

So two things I'm thinking of.

One is that, yeah, being intelligible has got to be the first thing that if you're learning a language, you've got to just focus on being understood and being clear.

Now, that might involve picking an accent which seems to be the neutral form and trying to aim at that, which probably in English is going to be a form of RP, a sort of modern standard RP is probably going to be the one, right?

Because that seems to be what most people will default to when they're attempting to be clear and neutral, you know?

So...

That's happened to me.

I'll give myself as an example.