I came up an interesting article (by Emily Sheridan of dailymail.co.uk) yesterday, which talked about Michelle Dockery’s – the acclaimed  Lady Mary Crawley of Downton Abbey actress- weariness over Downton fans who find  her real life estuary accent shocking.

What a surprise that was to me! First, because I didn’t expect people would care so much. Second, because I realised no matter how much “English language studying” I do or no matter how many films I watch I  cannot  become fully familiar with  the strong assumptions  that the diversities of the English accents convey, although I am able to distinguish among “standard” , “posh” and “unrefined” accents. Fourth, I did not know what estuary accent is. To tell you the truth, I had never been a linguistics fan  -literature is my cup of tea. Anyway, I got to search about it a little and I found this hillarious video about posh English accent:

and then all-time-classic “Friends” Phoebe trying to impress with a posh accent:

Then the original question “what is estuary accent” may be answered in this video:

and here.

What’s even more surprising is that British people change their accent to more posh or less posh according to what they wish to achieve. Read about it in another dailymail.co.uk article here.

P.S.

Great photos in the first article, by the way.