A friend and I conversed before he went to Europe. He was spending a few days in Prague and more time in Budapest but avoiding the most interesting cities, Paris and London. About London, he said,: “If you can understand anyone there.”

His observation is true. I watch financial news and the reporters and anchormen from London speak cockney. They like to roll along, speaking fast and emitting vowels and consonants like a machine gun. They have different “A-B-Cs.’ It’t\s time for subtitles. Modern financial channels lose audience when the reporters and anchormen can’t be understood except by mates at the local pub. These mates should be taken off the air.

I observe the language spoken in America is closer to the language spoken by Shakespeare five centuries ago. Indeed, American media has eliminated most accents, specifically from the South accents, last loudly pronounced by Gomer Pyle. The English have tried to eliminate localized accents. Cockney is not broadcast by the BBC as representing anything close to the King’s English. And oddly, in a 2023 production, Funny Woman, (Gemma Arteron) set during the 1960s, the main character [Gemma] was almost not hired because she spoke with a Blackpool accent (near Livermore). There are subtitles. Hearing and watching Gemma Arteron do a Blackpool accent, is preferable than hearing Englishmen spit out cockney on financial news.

The English have much work to do to make accents in their media productions understandable to world wide audiences, just as financial networks need to broadcast in accents understandable to people expecting Shakespeare’s English. 

The current facts reveal no one has hired Professor Henry Higgens and his prize pupil, Eliza Doolittle to cure airways of cockney.