杏吧原创

Even the Queen of England no longer speaks the Queen鈥檚 English. A comparison
of Christmas messages she broadcast in the 1950s and the 1980s has shown that
her accent has drifted towards a standard southern British accent typical of
younger, lower-class speakers, with subtle cockney influences (Nature,
vol 408, p 927). Team leader Jonathan Harrington of Macquarie University in
Sydney concludes that any attempt to defend pronunciation against social change
is 鈥渁s unlikely as King Canute鈥檚 attempts to defeat the tides鈥�.