My thoughts on an Academy for English

I think that an Academy for English wouldn't affect Britain's grammar, punctuation or spelling in any way. There will still be people out there who still use "txt spk" and poor grammar, regardless of having an Academy or not.
In my opinion it all depends on the situation of the person, whether they have had a good education or not, where the come from etc, when you regard the way that they use language.
To sum things up, I dont think it's right or even possible to monitor the way that English speakers use language, as it is forever changing and developing. An Academy simply couldnt keep up.

Thoughts about R.P

My thoughts on RP (received pronunciation)
It is a non-regional accent, often associated with a persons class and can be heard comming from people who have attended public and boarding schools.

It used to be known as the BBC accent, it still technically is whereas the modern version is alot less toned down.

Socially, it actually has a lot of stigma attatched to it, especially if your in certain area's. People could mistake you for being arrogant.

The Brummie Accent

From the research that I have conducted, I found that there is actually a lot of stigma attatched to it. For an example, read this article on the accent, headlined as "Worse than silence"
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article3671116.ece (4th April 2008)


People with the Birmingham accent are often thought of as uneducated louts, think Chavs.
The media reinforces this stereotype further by producing fabricated poll results (The poll was on the nations most favoured accent)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3073282/Brummie-accent-voted-least-cool-in-Britain.html (24th September 2008)


Finally, to reinforce this unfair stereotype further, I found an article all about how having a certain accent could boost yourself in the carreer department.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002916/Having-Glaswegian-accent-hinders-career-Essex-twang-helps-job.html (13th June 2011)
I believe that the information was also fabricated due to the lack of information on how they got these results, It is biased towards the Brummie accent, as it came out as 2nd as an accent "most likely to harm your carreer".

The origins of English (Old English - Middle English period)

The Anglo-Saxons

• During this era, many words are borrowed from Latin. For example, Religion; Angel, bishop, chalice, deacon, front, martyr and mass
• Everyday vocabulary - Candle, cucumber, cheese, cup, elephant, fever, giant, history etc
• The Anglo-Saxons preferred to use their own language rather than the celtic language
• They were a pagan race and traces still remain in the names of four days of the week; Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (They commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frig)

The Vikings

• A selection of the 1,800 Scandinavian loan words that probably entered the language at this time: awkward, band, bull, crawl, die, drag, freckle, gasp, harbour etc
• More that 1,500 place names in England have Scandinavian origins, particularly Yorkshire and Lincolnshire
• The language of the Danes exerts an immense and long lasting influence on old English, especially in the north and east
• Many Scandinavian personal names come from his time, especially those ending in -'son'. And some very common words, for example: both, same, get, give and take - enter the language, as do regular pronouns like they, them and their

The Normans

• English continues to evolve after the Norman Conquest, particularly in grammar. Word order becomes increasingly important in conveying the meaning of a sentence, rather than the traditional use of special word endings
• Norman scribes spell words using their own conventions, such as qu- instead of cw. Slowly but surely, distinctive Old English characters begin to die out
• French is established as the language of power and officialdom, English is still used by the majority of people but is seen as "peasants" language, Latin is the language of the church and education and England becomes a tri-lingual country

Anglo-Saxon words: Things I found interesting

How some of English’s stranger spellings can now be explained, for example, the word Daughter comes from the Anglo-Saxon word Dohtor (pronounced how its spelt) which sounds incredibly familiar to the modern word we use now.

However, other words will sound completely strange, as the word has changed in usage or has been replaced in modern English by a word from a different language, for example, the word Temporary used to be known as læne.

The Anglo-Saxon alphabet has striking similarities to the modern English alphabet, with some differences. The Anglo-Saxon alphabet is as follows, a b c d e f g h i l m n p r s t u w x y ð þ æ with the letters j q v k and z missing.