Does your accent really matter?
“How now, brown cow?” was a phrase devised by elocution teachers in the mid 1920s, to work on the rounding of vowel sounds. It means, ‘How are things, brown cow?’. It is often jokingly associated with ‘posh’ people (people perceived as ‘upper class’).
The point is, we all have an accent. Received Pronunciation (RP) is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the standard accent of educated English as spoken in the south of England”. It used to be the only accent you would hear on the BBC, but nowadays regional accents of all kinds have been added to the mix. If you are learning English as a second language, it is worth remembering that you will be understood more easily, by more people around the world, if your accent is fairly neutral. Dialects are great ( I love them), but they do restrict your audience. I once met a Basque doctor who had worked ten years in Glasgow as a GP. His English was absolutely fluent, and he was a very witty talker, but I was constantly asking him to repeat himself because I found his Glaswegian accent so unfamiliar. Frustrating for both of us!
