Demand for elocution lesson soars

According to a report written by The Tutor Pages, there was a large increase in requests for speech and elocution private tuition in 2011. Elocution was the subject with the highest number of enquiries per tutor (2nd highest was university level statistics). One of the elocution tutors cited in the report said she thought that the film The King's Speech was responsible for the growth in interest, with people thinking that if the king's serious speech impediment could be improved, then their lesser problems could be easily solved too.

 

All sorts of people want to change the way they speak - professionals, those in the media, even religious ministers. Some people want help with presentation skills and public speaking, but the commonest request is to help lose or soften a regional accent. The largest group of people with this request comes from Birmingham and the West Midlands. Many of these people feel they are being discriminated against in their quest for employment or promotion because of their accent. One enquirer said he'd been told he sounded 'thick' or 'like a thug'. However, most people don't want to lose their accent completely, just to tone it down and make themselves easier to understand.

 

Another large number of people approaching the tutorial agency are professionals from overseas who want to acquire a 'posh' accent. Joanna Lumley has been specifically mentioned as a role model (if you don't know what Joanna Lumley sounds like, click here).

 

Parents often approach The Tutor Pages with the aim of getting their teenage children to speak differently, and snobbism is often apparent in some of the quotes in the report. One Cheshire parent was horrified because his or her son had developed an 'irritating Scouse accent', another was horrified when his or her daughter moved from a private to a state school and the girl's accent changed.

 

Elocution lessons were quite common when I was a young child (I never had them, but at secondary school we had speech and drama classes, which were similar, I suppose). Elocution then fell out of favour for several decades, but seemingly it's in fashion again. Elocution was never considered a traditional academic subject, and even now I notice in the profiles of the tutors in The Tutor Pages report, that most have a singing or acting background, not one in phonetics and linguistics.

 

Here's the report from The Tutor Pages (in pdf format).

Comments

[Marc Leavitt]

Susan:
A lot of actors have "lost" their accents for professional reasons. Michael Caine comes to mind. If you watch him in "Zulu," one of his early movies, he speaks with the plummiest of accents, despite his cockney origins. Cary Grant, who hailed from Bristol, not only "lost" his accent, but created an ideolect unlike anyone else on either side of the Atlantic. Here in the states a number of TV presenters come to mind, but off duty, most of them relasx into their native accents. By the way, one of the best contemporary practitioners is Hugh Laurie in the "House" TV series. It never occurred to me that he wasn't an American until one day when I saw a clip of him on a TV talk show, speaking in his normal Oxbridge accent.

[John]

The reference to Henry Higgins in the linked piece was amusing, and it actually supports Marc's point above. On film, Higgins was played by, as we all know, Rex Harrison. Harrison was born and educated on Merseyside (Huyton). Presumably he had some degree of Liverpudlian accent and intonation to overcome.

[John]

"Overcome" for the Henry Higgins role, that is! Bothing wrong with the accent from my LFC-tainted perspective.

[Jemmy Hope]

Meanwhile Joan Bakewell is informed by the BBC that her accent is now too posh for them. I spot a niche in the publishing market, "Estuarian for Dummies".

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks for all your comments. The names mentioned belong to a generation who felt the need to hide their regional accent to achieve success, I suppose. I have read the same articles about Joan Bakewell as Jemmy, and see she says that when she went to university she was ridiculed and patronised for her northern accent. How things change!