Shadowing Practice: Upper class British speech, old and modern - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In this video I want to dig into what makes posh speech today differ from the old-fashioned kind. Many of you will have heard or seen me use the phrase “posh and old-fashioned” -- generally to describe the upper class RP accent which these symbols were carefully chosen to represent. If you read them with their real IPA values if young men lack posh books and learn speech far too broad, those sounds by boys make clear they're poor you get something that I think most Brits and many others will agree sounds very posh and old-fashioned so comically posh and old-fashioned that it couldn't be used by a BBC newsreader which begs the question why do you still find these symbols all over the place English has a lot of vowel sounds But do the two terms, posh, and old-fashioned, necessarily go together? Obviously, not all old fashioned speech sounds posh. Many of you will have elderly grandparents or great grandparents whose speech seems in various ways old-fashioned, but who aren’t posh.
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But what about the other way round? Can someone sound posh, even very posh, but not old-fashioned? Well, we do still have people in the public eye and ear, many of them young, who come across as sounding markedly posh, but who aren't simply using old school RP.
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What you’ll hear from today’s posh speakers is a mixture of old RP and more modern features. And it’s not a random mixture. Broadly, if we divide the vowel space of old RP into four quadrants, the RP vowels in the upper left and lower right tend to be conserved, while the vowels in the lower left and upper right tend to shift away from their old values, generally in the same anti-clockwise direction that characterized the change from RP to modern SSB.
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Someone that most people would agree sounds posh is ex-prime minister Boris Johnson, in fact some would say he exaggerates this deliberately. In his vowel system, conservative features include a very close, front, monophthongal FLEECE vowel, and a, very back LOT vowel. In other words, he actually sounds like the familiar symbols. Let’s first compare his FLEECE vowel with the Queen sixty years ago.
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to serve in every kind of capacity where they may be needed a weird sense that maybe the key thing is after Putin has condescended to have a ceasefire Johnson’s KIT vowel similarly tends to be close.
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needed continually giving the Ukrainians Shifting to the opposite corner of the vowel space, here are Johnson’s old school LOT and PALM vowels.
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Just enough to stop them and got on with it in Afghanistan And here’s another low back PALM vowel from Scottish actor Rose Leslie, who grew up in her family’s castle and is so posh she sounds English Leonardo DiCaprio walked past me once Now let’s look at a posh shifted vowel. Perhaps the vowel most shifted is GOOSE, its old RP value shifting forward in the vowel space.
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But I can do something else I do think that Putin was further emboldened in 2022 Boris Johnson’s forward GOOSE vowel is so distinctive it's picked up on by impressionist Matt Forde.
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And you are going to erupt But this isn't just a Johnsonian feature. Here’s a much younger speaker, Arthur Chatto, great-nephew of Queen Elizabeth, old Etonian and ex-fitness guy on instagram. The sound quality’s bad but you can still hear his vowels.
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relax shoulders, relax arms. Three. Two. One Of course SSB has a non-back GOOSE, typically a diphthong an ooh sound But the modern posh GOOSE is typically all-fronted, so any glide is just in the lips. Here’s the now Princess of Wales.
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You do get to know each other We often find that when modern posh shifts something, it really shifts it.
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Going back to the more conservative top left quadrant, we find, as so often in accents of English, that FACE patterns with FLEECE. SSB FACE is relatively open, ɛj, but modern posh speakers tend to keep it relatively close, like the RP symbol.
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It was amazing to tell her Accepting the changes that inevitably occur Britain also plays quite a role in her story The last there was Dr Sarah Grant, senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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A quick mention of the so-called happY vowel. In old RP this was the KIT vowel, as in hæpɪ, but in modern posh, as in SSB, it’s the FLEECE vowel, hapɪj.
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To serve in every kind of capacity Accepting the changes that inevitably occur Now let’s look at the other shifting quadrant, lower left. The signature vowel here, of course, is TRAP. Here’s a fairly conservative TRAP vowel.
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I wonder how we'd go about that I think Old Etonian Tom Hiddleston is manipulating the vowel there for stylistic effect. To be honest I barely think he belongs in this video at all. I’d put him at the posh end of SSB, but I think his background and his visual image lead many to think he sounds posher than he really does. In selecting contemporary speakers as examples, the criterion I've used is roughly, does this voice seem to me markedly posher than a typical newsreader? I haven't simply gone for people whom I know to have upper class backgrounds.
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Here’s the authentic old TRAP vowel from the Queen.
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helping the backward, or the hungry The shifted TRAP vowel is lowered and backed from to .
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Or, on that and it's hop, back Back in 2010 a viral video by Matt Lacey made great fun of young, posh folk taking gap years, and it paid special attention to the super-shifted TRAP vowel.
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Oh no Tarquin. I can't come shopping on the King's Road today.
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Yeah because I'm on my gap year at the moment In fact the shifted TRAP can sound like the Queen’s STRUT vowel.
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What makes me angry or the hungry Now what about the DRESS vowel, which for old RP was located by A. C. Gimson on the border between our conservative upper left quadrant and our shifting lower left quadrant. Well, as we might expect, DRESS is torn.
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It’s pronounced by some modern posh speakers with a conservative, relatively close quality.
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We continually said to them You bring your legs But other speakers have it opening up, following the shifting TRAP vowel. Some younger speakers, perhaps more commonly female speakers, have a DRESS vowel like the RP TRAP vowel.
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In terms of 18th century dress Again it was in amongst a lot of other guests So we wanted to have a section that was really rich in objects Also typically shifted in modern posh is the first element of the PRICE diphthong. In old RP this could be quite front, as the symbol suggests, but in modern posh, as in SSB, it’s further back.
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deprived of a great stabilising influence in their lives so I would say forward and to the side spies best night of my life Some RP speakers have lived long enough to have used both the old PRICE and the modern.
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From its size and markings I was quite sure that it was a python I nipped down the tree. And then... I had to face the python Over a much shorter time span, the accent of Kate Middleton strikes me, from the small number of videos I’ve watched, to have become notably less posh.
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I at the time I hope you'll find it interesting I can believe what the tabloids suggest about her having had coaching to improve the confidence of her public speaking, but the idea that she’s become more posh seems to me the usual media rubbish. Let’s turn from the front-closing diphthongs to the traditionally back closing diphthongs. The GOAT vowel has been fronting for a century.
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Gimson updated Daniel Jones’s ou to əʊ but he also mentioned a more front starting point owe Now, paralleling GOOSE, modern posh GOAT tends to front not just the first element, but also the glide.
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Finishing off with plank hops okay? So Well I just hope I look after it no, no Another modern feature is the backing of the GOAT vowel when it's before a dark L, sometimes called GOAT allophony. This didn’t happen in ewld RP old people but it characterizes SSB as well as our posh-sounding contemporary speakers.
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so Putin was emboldened And to roll with the punches of life This brings us to the MOUTH vowel, where things are a bit more variable. In old RP it started in the lower right quadrant and glided into the upper right quadrant, , and there was a variant with practically no lip rounding extremely proud which gave rise to the popular idea that posh people pronounced house as “hice”. In modern SSB, the onset has gone against the anticlockwise tide and is now front, , but none of my modern posh speakers use that. Some of them go for the no lip-rounding option, sometimes with no glide at all, and others treat MOUTH more like GOOSE and GOAT, fronting the whole thing, glide and all.
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This was about four in the morning Pine has to take him down Bringing them back to their townhouses The song that will always get me dancing would be Shout Now what about the RP monophthongs that Gimson described as central, STRUT and NURSE? Well, both are variable. I certainly need to give the STRUT vowel another video of its own, but for now we can observe that it’s often shifted back, probably pushed by the shifted TRAP vowel, so that it becomes more like a short version of the PALM vowel.
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Endless fudge This is common in SSB too. Here’s the great Simon Roper demonstrating his own SSB STRUT vowel. He lengthens it, which to me makes it sound like the PALM vowel.
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above The main thing I notice with modern posh NURSE is that it tends to be very open.
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Some speakers produce it further back, encroaching on the PALM vowel I pronounced your name correctly, Amarteifio -- perfect but more often it seems further forward, potentially encroaching on the SQUARE vowel, which itself is very open.
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So I think it's the perfect storm That will get me up on my feet and kind of pumping in the air This brings us back to the whole topic of chain shifts. As I’ve explained elsewhere, chain shifts are where multiple vowels shift, like links in a chain, so that the perceptual distance between them is maintained, and each remains distinguishable from its neighbours. In my book English After RP I describe a whole anti-clockwise sea change describing the differences between RP and SSB.
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So how could two quadrants of the vowel space opt in to the shift, and two quadrants opt out? Well you could say that the old RP vowels weren’t evenly spaced in the first place. Let’s focus on the two signature vowels that shifted, TRAP and GOOSE. The raised RP TRAP vowel meant that the three front short vowels KIT DRESS and TRAP were compressed. As Gimson himself pointed out, "This compression of the front phonemes is a characteristic of RP, but regional dialects often show a greater qualitative separation of these phonemes.” In other words, there was pressure for TRAP to decompress. Now this encouraged the Queen’s frontish STRUT to get back to where it once belonged, but old RP’s very far back rounded LOT was so far away it wasn't obliged to shift as much in SSB.
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And at the top of the vowel space, there was a huge gulf between old RP’s very peripheral FLEECE and GOOSE vowels. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think these pronunciations were a fashion, an affectation of the early-mid 20th century upper classes, probably to differentiate themselves as far as physically possible from the Cockney riffraff.
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Note that German, which has two top corner vowels like this, and , also has an acoustically intervening vowel which helps keep them apart. The lack of such a third vowel in English allows GOOSE to shift forward, without disturbing the posh front .
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Now in the case of someone like Boris Johnson, GOOSE fronting clearly wasn't motivated by a desire, conscious or unconscious, to avoid sounding upper class. On the contrary, I think he represents what Gimson called Advanced RP, tweaking the two corners of the vowel space that were most egregiously out of date, but otherwise mostly maintaining old RP’s sociophonetic identity. And I'm sure he never wanted to read the news anyway.
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However, having tried to show that the selective vowel shifting of modern posh is compatible with vowel dispersal, I have to say that after listening to so much speech for this video, I do get the impression that an awful lot of modern posh vowels have at least the potential, in one context or another, to be pronounced in the region of -- drɐs, trɐp, strɐt, nɐs, prɐs, mɐθ, skwɐ. It’s no accident that that viral video was Gap Yah.
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To end, let’s look briefly at consonants, or at least one consonant, T. As in SSB , but not in old RP, modern posh often pronounces T as a glottal stop before a vowel in the next word.
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my favourite Eminem song I hope you'll find it interesting the book is actually set in Colombia Another SSB feature that I talk about a lot but which seems to me to get undermentioned is the affrication of /t/. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that Prince William does this a lot, often going further to spirantization, that's pronouncing /t/ as a fricative, like an /s/ but usually with less sibilance. This is common in Liverpool and in Ireland. It’s also something I’ve noticed all my life from posh actresses, as we used to call them. And it’s certainly in evidence among my modern posh speakers. I didn’t realise I lived somewhere called Brisson.
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And got on with it We see a lot of each other She's certainly an early modern celebrity William wasn't there for quite a bit of the time
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Mastering Modern vs. Old-Fashioned Posh British English: A Real-Life Guide
Ever wondered how today’s upper-class British speech differs from the "posh" accents of the past? The video breaks down this fascinating shift, showing how modern speakers blend traditional RP (Received Pronunciation) with fresh, contemporary features. Think Boris Johnson’s distinctive vowels or the Princess of Wales’s updated pronunciation—this is the English you hear in royal circles, high-profile interviews, and elite spaces today. It’s a perfect scenario to practice shadow speech, as it challenges you to mimic subtle vowel shifts and consonant sounds.
Useful Chunks & Collocations to Memorize
- "Markedly posh" – Describes speech that stands out as upper-class (e.g., "Her accent is markedly posh but not old-fashioned").
- "Vowel space" – The range of vowel sounds in a language (e.g., "Modern posh shifts the GOOSE vowel forward in the vowel space").
- "Anti-clockwise tide" – A common pattern in English vowel changes (e.g., "SSB vowels follow an anti-clockwise tide").
- "Glottal stop" – A consonant sound made by closing the throat (e.g., "Modern posh often uses a glottal stop for 't'").
- "Affrication of /t/" – Pronouncing "t" as a fricative (e.g., "Prince William uses affrication of /t/ in his speech").
Your Shadowing Challenge: Mimic Modern Posh Vowels
Ready to try the shadowing technique? Pick 30 seconds of the video—try Arthur Chatto’s fitness clip or the Princess of Wales’s interview. Play a short segment, pause, and repeat it immediately, focusing on: - The fronted GOOSE vowel ("you" as "yoo" instead of "yuh"). - The close FLEECE vowel ("need" with a tight "ee" sound). - The glottal stop in words like "got" or "not". This is how you improve English pronunciation—by copying real, natural speech. Use a shadowing site to slow down the audio if needed, and practice daily. You’ll notice your accent sounds more natural in no time! Remember, learning English with YouTube isn’t just about watching—it’s about doing. Hit play, shadow, and let your speech shine!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be conserved · may be needed · is lowered |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has condescended · haven't simply gone · have lived |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.