Re: First BBC Broadcast (14/11/1922)

 Ar an cúigiú lá déag de mí na Samhain, scríobh Adam Funk:

 > On 2024-11-15, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
 >
 > > On 2024-11-15 10:20:14 +0000, Ross Clark said:
 > ...
 > >> So the RP accent became known as "BBC English". The Advisory Committee
 > >> on Spoken English was set up in 1926 to provide approved pronunciations
 > >> for new words and foreign names, and as an authority to support news
 > >> readers against the inevitable complaints. A fascinating body in which
 > >> both Daniel Jones and George Bernard Shaw were involved.
 > >
 > > My recollection is that John Reith spoke as you'd expect a Scottish
 > > Calvinist to speak, but he insisted that people who spoke on the
 > > wireless ("radio" was lower class) should speak RP.
 >
 > I know Scottish accents vary regionally, but by religion? Or are
 > Calvinists, Episcopalians, & Roman Catholics very unevenly distributed
 > geographically?

I read Athel’s phrasing as describing someone with a) a Scottish accent who b)
may occasionally be wrong but is never uncertain. (As the adage puts it about
surgeons.)

There are some Church of Ireland accents in the Republic of Ireland; Leo
Varadkar, the former taoiseach, has one of them, from his time in a Church of
Ireland secondary school.

I assert that there are some people native to rural areas of the west of
Northern Ireland where I can hear much more Irish in their prosody and pitch
than is usual for NI, and those people have Irish surnames and are usually of
Catholic religious identity, but to my knowledge that hasn’t been studied.

In NI for most people, most of the time, you can’t tell from their speech
unless the name of the letter H comes up.

I can’t comment on corresponding variation within Scotland.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)