The queen's English

I sat in a classroom in Edinburgh, trying to understand why the phonetic transcription of the sentence the teacher had dictated to us didn't look anything like the way I was pronouncing it. I looked around the room. The others had the same expression on their faces. We were all confused.

The teacher giggled. "OK," she said. "Now try saying it as if you were the queen." So we did. And it made sense.

When you look up a word in the dictionary, the phonetic symbols that come after the word show you how to pronounce it. How to pronounce it the way the queen or Prince Charles would, that is. This accent is what's known as received pronunciation (RP for short). It is the standard that is used for phonetic transcription. RP is spoken by two per cent of the population of Britain -- quite a lot of people, I suppose.

So for the next four weeks, every time we had a phonetics class, eight Scots and a guy from Northern Ireland would sit there putting on posh English accents, trying to decipher the symbols in front of us. It seemed just a bit strange that we were having to put on fake accents so we could learn how to teach our mother tongue.

I felt a bit like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.