The rise of ‘accent softening’: why more and more people are changing their voices

Elocution lessons are back in vogue, with many people seeking to disguise their regional accents. But shouldn’t we be beyond this now?

‘I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” As I read this extract – from William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech – I hand a plastic spoon to my voice coach every time I arrive at an important word.

I am in central London, attending an “accent softening taster session” with the London Speech Workshop. Jamie Chapman, the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle, tells me that I begin my sentences with lots of energy but they fall flat at the end. He claims that passing the spoons will help me “land” my thoughts: “You have to imagine that, every time you speak, you have put something inside your listener’s hand,” he says.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Y9UT3C