Dandylover1

Does anyone know where I might find scholarly articles, books, etc. on U and Non-U vocabulary? I am unsure whether we are allowed to post links here, so I will briefly quote from Wikipedia. "U and non-U English usage, with "U" standing for upper class, and "non-U" representing the aspiring middle classes, was part of the terminology of popular discourse of social dialects (sociolects) in Britain in the 1950s. The different vocabularies can often appear quite counter-intuitive: the middle classes prefer "fancy" or fashionable words, even neologisms and often euphemisms, in attempts to make themselves sound more refined ("posher than posh"), while the upper classes in many cases stick to the same plain and traditional words that the working classes also use, as, confident in the security of their social position, they have no need to seek to display refinement." I actually find this quite interesting, coming from the perspective of one who loves nineteenth-century English, in which the upper class were constantly adding new words, particularly of French origin, or using established ones from French, Latin, Greek, etc. I would have thought the middle and lower classes would use the simpler words. How many of you find this to be true, and does it still hold today?

Hello. I am a native speaker of American English. However, while I find Transatlantic acceptable for daily usage (if I can master it) I have loved Upper Received Pronunciation since I was a child, and it has always been a passion of mine to learn it properly. This is the form used from roughly the nineteenth century until the 1950's or so, and often contains such features as the trap-bath split, rhoticity in words such as story and when a word ending in r is followed by one beginning with a vowel such as father and mother, and the eh sound in words such as happy and family. I have been told that, although my pronunciation is good, my mouth is often too open and my intonation doesn't always fit this form of English. To me, it sounds as if I am better at Conservative RP than Upper. I am totally blind, so I am unable to read material with graphics, to use the IPA system, or to follow lip movement based on videos. Perhaps, someone here can assist me via audio calls on Facetime, Zoom, or Skype, or I can upload some files of my speaking to this site for correction. Accent aside, I am a life-long grammar prescriptivist and lover of upper class nineteenth-century English, which I wish to adopt permenantly, both in speech and in writing. To that end, I purchased two scholarly books on the subject and am in the process of scanning them into my computer so that I can read them. Again, any suggestions would be sincerely appreciated. I am also learning French, using An Analytical and Practical French Grammar (and its supplementary reader) by Jean Gustave Keetels (1894) as my main texts, along with some slightly newer readers and dictionaries. I am a beginner in Latin and am learning that using An Introduction to the Latin Tongue For the Use of Youth by Charles Duke Yonge (1874), and New Latin Grammar by Charles E. Bennett as my main texts, along with some readers and other Eton Latin exercise books. If any of this interests you, perhaps we can work together, though the txt versions of these books contain many errors and I may need help in reading them.