Luke Thompson

I think that I don't really have a particularly strong accent as a default base level.

For example, at home with my mum and dad, I'll pretty much speak like this.

But then when I'm with my friends from the Midlands, because I spent half my...

my youth, let's say in the Birmingham area.

So when I'm with my mates, then I'll start to sound a bit more brummy and it sort of comes out a bit more like this.

And then maybe like the intonation goes a bit more Birmingham like that.

And then with my friends from London, I might start,

I'm sounding a bit more like a Londoner and I'll start to drop my T's and I'll say, is that bottle of water over there?

What's he doing?

You know, I'll start to sound a bit more like this.

So I move around.

But as an English teacher, I do tend to neutralize my accent to an extent and I end up with this RP.

So I think that probably RP is probably a natural accent for people to aim at if they're learning English because it seems to be a sort of neutral English.

That's not to say it's better than other accents or even more common than other accents because I think –

RP is actually, there's only about 5% of people speaking English in the UK will speak with this accent.

But that's not to say there is another accent that's got a larger section of the pie chart.

That the pie chart, in fact, is really many, many small pieces

There isn't one accent that dominates.

No, I think that it depends.

So I think when I talk to my listeners, I'm assuming that they are not at the beginning of their learning journey.