British English is a Minority Dialect in Britain

If you’re writing British characters into your story don’t think we speak like The Queen or Eddie Redmayne because we don’t

On 30th July 2021, Lord Digby Jones made a major error regarding his native language, British English. Naturally, he did it in a tweet.

Lord Jones is a highly successful member of the British establishment; he’s the former head boy at an exclusive private school and he attended the exclusive University College London (UCL), studying law. He went on to become a highly successful businessman before becoming a minister in the British Government. He was the Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry for six years.

In a series of tweets, Lord Jones first criticised a former sportswoman and now TV sports commentator named Alex Scott for her pronunciation and accent. He then dug a deeper hole by turning on Beth Rigby, a respected TV journalist, and Priti Patel, the UK’s Home Secretary, for the same ‘offence’.

He criticised them because they didn’t speak his version of British English, the dialect considered as the UK’s standard and used by the rich, powerful and privately educated. Think posh British actors like Eddie Redmayne, posh British singers like Chris Martin, The BBC, The Royal Family and senior British politicians.

Lord Jones was incorrect in criticising Scott, Rigby and Patel for using poor British English, a point made in response to his tweets by over 200 British linguistics academics and just about every British newspaper journalist.

Scott, Rigby and Patel do not use poor British English. They just use a different dialect to the British English Jones uses.

What Grammarly, Microsoft, English bloggers and Lord Jones call British English is known in the UK as Received Pronunciation or RP. Other terms are BBC English, Oxford English and The Queen’s English.

RP is the dialect of the professional and upper classes, mainly from southern England, and is spoken by just 2 to 3% of the UK’s population¹. That's about 1.4 to 2 million people in a population of 68 million.

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