I speak the accent of hypocrisy
When I first came to the UK, I was introduced to the word posh , which, among other things, was often used to describe a particular way of speaking associated with the British upper classes. I found this rather fascinating because, while I had always understood that people spoke English differently depending on where they came from, I had never given much thought to how something as seemingly ordinary as pronunciation could reveal, or at least suggest, someone's position within a social hierarchy. As I spent more time in the UK, I occasionally encountered people who consciously adopted what we might consider a posh British accent, and it made me wonder whether the appeal of speaking this way was entirely linguistic, or whether there was something else that people were trying to acquire through their pronunciation. After all, when we imagine someone speaking with a posh British accent, we rarely think about the accent alone. We might conjure an image of someone who is educated, soph...
