potato in the mouth?

<< You can judge for yourself how The Queen's accent has changed over 50 years - not to mention her voice! This was her Christmas 2007 message to the people of Britain and British Commonwealth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzLvBxldMNc >>

Her accent sounds exactly the same to me. The only difference is that she sounds older.

***Did people really talk like that back then?***

Apparently they did - at least a certain class of the English people did anyway. England back in the 1950s was still very much a class conscious country - thankfully England is now quite different from what it was in those days in that respect.

I found Lizzie's 1957 speech pattern quite hard to take, like all those old b&w films we still see on certain TV channels. Listen to the way she pronounced the simple word "lost" - it came out of her 1957 north and south something like "lorst". It never did appeal to Scottish ears and that's for sure. Her late mother's accent was even more excruciating to listen to at times but she was born in 1900 so eons away from the present day relative egalitariansim.

The younger members of the current Royal Family now sound pretty much like the rest of their generation who speak standard RP Southern English English. That's includes a touch of Estuary from time to time......we don't mind that so much up here in Scotland. We're so used to hearing it.

''The whole "potato in the mouth" thing is just silly. No language sounds so. It's a derogatory term used to describe contemptuously anyone who speaks a different language, or even a dialect. I've heard it used from people from Frankfurt to describe Austrians.''

I don't know.
Vienna German accent seem to score high in ''Favorite regional accent'' (that is, any accent other than Hannover/TV Hochdeutsch) surveys in Germany... Germans find it quaint.

"Quaint" as in "potato in mouth?" However, I do also find it charming. I had a friend from there with the family name "Cerny." I think he could spend 2-3 seconds on the "r."