The Queen’s Christmas Broadcast - How the Queen’s English has Changed Over Time

Her Majesty the Queen

In 1932, George V began a tradition of broadcasting a Royal Message to the Commonwealth of Nations at Christmas. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has continued this annual tradition.

I was going to simply post the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast for you to enjoy, but this reminded me of a study on language and pronunciation which I’d like to share with you.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “the Queen’s English”, referring to a certain accent of English as spoken in the south of England (aka Received Pronunciation).

This accent is often associated with money, privilege, and the upper class -- the British monarch is held up as an example of perfect diction. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare refers to ‘an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.’

Interestingly, Her Majesty the Queen arguably no longer speaks the Queen’s English of the 1950s. In fact, it turns out that the Queen’s speech has perceptibly drifted, becoming “definitely less upper-class” according to royal biographer Kenneth Rose.

This drift in the Queen’s pronunciation was empirically studied by Jonathan Harrington, Sallyanne Palethorpe and Catherine Watson, who published research in 2000 that acoustically analyzed those Royal Christmas Broadcasts, to see whether the Queen’s pronunciation of certain vowels changed over time (Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts, in Journal of the International Phonetic Association, later abbreviated in Nature).

The researchers found that there had been a “fairly dramatic change from the 1950s to the late 1960s/early 1970s, with very little change thereafter to the mid-late 1980s”.

Listen for yourself -- here’s the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast for this year: link

and for comparison, the 1957 Christmas Broadcast: link



God Save the Queen! And Merry Christmas!


Complete reading: 

• The Nature summary cited above (pdf)
• The original study by Harrington, Palethorpe and Watson (pdf)
• Jonathan Harrington’s 2006 followup in the Journal of Phonetics, An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts (2006) 
• To read the layman’s summary of all this, see How the Queen’s English has grown more like ours in The Telegraph
• The transcripts for all of the Queen’s Christmas Messages since 1952

Occupy North Pole!

Santa Claus is the 1%. 

Santa: a corpulent image of corporate excess
Illus.: Thomas Nast, 1881

He only works a single day each year.

Yet he merrily exploits an unpaid labour force of bedraggled elves, who toil away frantically inside a mass-production factory, euphemistically known as ‘Santa’s workshop’ -- or is that Santa’s sweatshop?

(Do the elves have a labour contract? Or are they essentially slaves? An impartial third-party audit of the elves’ working conditions has never been released to the public.)

Just look at him: plump, jolly Santa is the very image of excess. In The Night Before Christmas, he’s described as being ‘dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot’. And who is the gluttonous recipient of the milk and cookies, year after year?

Santa’s List: Orwellian tool for
oppressive social conditioning?

Santa -- one man, alone! -- wields the monopoly power to decide whether you’ve been naughty or nice. By what means did he acquire his capricious and judgemental authority? We never held any democratic elections for this.

Doesn’t that strike you as an unseemly and inequitable concentration of influence for a single person?  

Where is the transparency and accountability in his decision-making process? If your name shows up in the wrong spot on that arbitrary, notorious List of his, you wind up with a lump of coal instead of a present! Sure, he claims to check it twice -- that’s supposed to be quality control? What are the safeguards to prevent systemic fraud or other abuses?

And, most importantly with respect to the Occupy framework, why does Santa consistently give rich kids more expensive gifts than to poor kids? Social justice is being failed.

“He knows when you’ve been good or bad” -- since when did we grant Santa unfettered access into our homes, to conduct Panopticon surveillance for every moment of our personal lives? It’s a gross invasion of our privacy rights -- the first step towards a totalitarian dictatorship.

Notice how, during the busiest travelling time of the year, Santa flies with impunity across national borders -- without any checkpoints, customs inspections, or security monitoring whatsoever. No lines or waiting for the privileged old elf! Of course, he also lives in magnificent isolation at the North Pole -- free from taxation, and sheltered from the prying eyes of the masses.

Santa: shilling for conspicuous consumption

Despite all this, the federal government insists on providing Santa with an ongoing, heavy subsidy -- mail addressed to Santa is typically answered on his behalf by legions of ‘volunteer’ postal workers.

He doesn’t need to lift a finger, and the feds are there to bail him out from all those tricky questions kids can ask.

In return, few figures serve commercial interests as eagerly as Santa Claus. For example, Haddon Sundblom famously portrayed Santa as a dedicated Coca-Cola quaffer for several decades (A persistent meme continues to circulate that Santa’s red and white uniform is a deliberate invocation of the Coca-Cola corporate colours. Coincidence? Perhaps...).

To conclude, we need to re-examine our blind acceptance of the man in red.

Under the deceptive guise of patronizing beneficence and ritualized good-cheer, Mr. Kringle has insinuated himself into a position of deeply secular symbolism, antithetical to the roots of Christmas.

His materialist emphasis on gifts serves only to whitewash greed as a value, and to drive shopping behaviour during the holiday season. When children make their annual pilgrimage of obeisance -- while he sits regally on his throne at the mall -- what’s the key question he asks of them? “What do you want for Christmas?”

That is how the cultural indoctrination of lifelong consumerism begins.

I invite one and all to join with me in protest -- and together let’s #OccupyNorthPole!

Santarchy 2005, Toronto: The movement for change begins
(yours truly w/ grey beard)

Take Action Now Against Santa’s Moral Fascism
Photo: New York Daily News

We are the 99% -- not Santa
Photo: Steve Rhodes

Attempts to contact Santa for comment have not yet met with a response.

--
Support resources for this post provided by: United Snowmen Against Climate Change.

The Queen's Christmas Message (1957)

God save the Queen! Now the oldest ruling British Monarch ever -- you go, Liz!

See also
The Queen’s Christmas Broadcast - How the Queen’s English has Changed Over Time