AIBU to ask how "well" you speak?

[buggerthebotox]

Saw and article in the Mail (sorry!!) about "declining standards of spoken English" and I am wondering how you all speak and whether you consider yourselves to be "well spoken"?

Pretty well-spoken. I'm a languages teacher and a stickler for grammar, but the poshness of my accent tends to vary (unintentionally) according to my audience or social situation. I'm a southener btw.
One thing I find interesting is when I hear children speak very differently from their parents. Not in the sense of having a different regional accent, but in the sense of sounding more or less 'well-spoken'. I could be wrong, but when I was a child it seemed as though most kids I knew considered it cooler to sound less posh than one's parents, whereas I have recently noticed a lot of families where the children sound posher than their parents. I was wondering why this might be - perhaps it stems from the popularity of posher-sounding young actors, celebs, etc.?

Thick Scouse accent here, nothing ends in "ing" and sometimes I have been known to tag "la" at the end of a sentence. DH is a lot more well spoken than me - no idea why he's also a scouser, and my younger dds tend have a well spoken scouse accent with a bit of an American twang. (I blame Dora). DSD's accent is even thicker than mine and she speaks so fast it's hard to understand. My sister lived in London for 3 years and moved back home last year. Her accent always makes me laugh, it's a mixture of thick scouse, cockney and really well spoken.

Quietly well spoken with, I'm told, exceptionally clear diction.

I have to speak and write very clearly and correctly for my work, and do so day-to-day as well. My parents speak with a RP accent but somehow my accent at work becomes two notches posher. I have no idea where I picked it up from and sometimes cringe at the way things come out of my mouth.

'Declining standards of spoken English'

What does this even mean? Surely they aren't referring to English spoken with a regional accent/dialect vs RP. Regional accents and dialects are ancient, people have been speaking like this for a long, long time and yet somehow we have bought into the idea that they are not 'proper English'.

I sound really common, I think and I hate it.

Even worse is that in my head I'm quite well spoken - I think quite posh, if that makes sense.

So I'll say something like "I don't like so-and-so - he's AWFULLY coarse", in an Essex accent.

I'd love to speak more "nicely", and am trying to ensure the kids speak more nicely than what I do

I am bilingual - posh (learnt from mum) and radio Scotland ( from dad)

A bit like one of the Famous Five.

Which one, I'll let you decide.

Woof.

I get told that I'm 'well posh', but I don't think I am. I'd say just standard RP, really. But probably within the 'well-spoken' category.

I don't have any kind of regional accent. When I hear my voice recorded I'm quite surprised how posh it sounds - not drawly "can't be bothered to speak properly" posh - more Kate Middleton posh. It doesn't sound like that coming out of my mouth. DS and DH speak the same way.

I an not well spoken at all. I come fae north ayrshire and luv the fact I have such a strong accent

I speak well. When I hear myself on tape I realise I sound posh.

After living in various countries over the last 13 years my accent veers wildly around the globe depending on who I am talking to and about what.

My family tell me I sound 'English' though, and to them that means posh. But that could be because the are a bunch of nasally bogans (which I still do very well when necessary ).

We call it the 'International Accent' most expats I know have it, regardless of where they happen to be from and what their native tongue is.

I think I speak with a fairly neutral Southern/London accent but when I hear recordings of my voice I sound much posher than I do in my head.

I can't be that well spoken or written though because I have no idea what RP is! :o

Can someone fill me in?

RP = received pronounciation. How they used to talk on the BBC. Think Dimblebys.

I don't consider myself to be well spoken, I have to make an effort to pronounce my words correctly as I have a bad habit of dropping certain letters. Because I don't have a regional accent sometimes people mistakenly think that I am well spoken until they listen carefully! Foreigners always think I am posh.

Dh has a Londonish drawl, he is very lazy at forming his words and I am always nagging him. Ds1 has a very english voice, no regional accent at all but again he can be lazy and I have to remind him to form his words correctly.

I have no idea why I don't have a regional accent, I was always aware that my voice was very different from my families and school friends but no idea why! Ds1 has a very similar sounding tone to me.

Well i do not have a posh voice at all.

I sound like someone from the set of Emmerdale - namely Chas Dingle!

I am well-spoken gone lazy, and if I'm not concentrating on it I have a bit of boarding school drawl, which I don't like. But I can turn on the cut-glass posh if I have to - you get treated a lot better if you speak 'well' I think.

I am posh punk. In my head I am one of The Clash - but I am sadly a well-spoken middle class bird.

I speak "well" in the sense that I don't use slang and try to be grammatically correct but I have an estuary accent so I suppose others might not think so! I hate the fact that some regional accents are acceptable but others (like mine) are not.

BUGGER some people would say your dislike of Jamie and Wossy was a bit snobby. I dont like them for their shallow attitudes. camerooney and blair dodumb down a bit. Sodoes wills windsor, I suppose it is fairly commonplce. But Wills with the tophat yesterday was not hiding the royal credentials. (Its a bloody silly old world)

In my head I speak I think I speak just normal accentless English, not posh but not placeable iyswim.

Then I heard my voice played back and I am a better spoken than I think. However that was in a work setting, I know I speak 'posher' at work because of the type of people I work with.

I deliberately made an effort from a young age to speak neutrally and not to have a Devon accent. DD however has no such stigma about coming from the west country and has a full on Gloucester accent. But dd picks up accents really quickly - she goes to Devon for a week and comes back sounding different. If she went to Liverpool for a fortniht she would come bck sounding like Ricky Tomlinson.

I say barth for bath and parth for path, is that wrong then?

I think my speech is improving.

I used to confuse less and fewer all the time but I hardly ever do that now. I rarely use an adjective when I mean an adverb but I do still sometimes split infinitives. If I'm writing I would never end a sentence with a preposition but I'm guilty of doing this when I'm speaking. I don't use double negatives and certainly don't use the wrong tense or get subject-verb agreements wrong.

My accent is fairly neutral. It isn't posh but I don't have a regional accent either.

My biggest failings are 'yeah' and 'dunno'. I hate it and cringe every time I hear them come out of my mouth.

I'm a teacher so I do think correct speech is important for me. I also work in an independent school so I'm very paranoid about the fact that 95% of the parents have a much 'posher' accent that I do. That's why I've worked so hard on making my grammar correct even though I can't exchange my very ordinary accent for an Eton one!