Accents are malleable. They shift and change over time. Just look at Gillian Anderson, or Millie Bobby Brown, or Harry Styles and his mumbling interviews as examples. These changes can be confusing, though they are often explained by emigration or bilingualism – or playing Elvis for 159 gruelling minutes in Austin Butler’s case. But no accent shift is more confusing than the popular faux-roadman or aspiring “slangster”, as I like to call them.
It seems that for every Londoner with a genuine accent, there exists a posh, wealthy and well-educated impostor. Swathes of privately educated men have infested London’s bars, clubs, DJ sets and workforces with the deranged notion that they should speak with an entirely affected accent. Why? Because they don’t know how to be themselves.
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