I learned it at UCL and I'm currently getting my PhD at UIC

@@HighlyEntropicMind I am sorry but I don't know those abbreviations. Can you write out the names of the universities?

@@HighlyEntropicMind Is the first one in London?

Thank you! Also, keep in mind that there is no "correct" way to speak any language. Languages and dialects are collections of rules humans invented to communicate, but there's no way to say that one set of rules is better than another What happens is that nations need to have standard dialect for official communication and that set of rules ends up being perceived as superior by others

@@HighlyEntropicMind In most countries, the speech of the region around the capital has been selected as a standard, unless some rational or political project has been set up to make a synthesis. But in the case of the UK, Received Pronunciation was quite far from what the majority of people anywhere spoke. It started life being presumed to be as superior only because of the power held by the tiny percentage of people who spoke it. They required it to be imposed and it was. The Norman invasion of 1066 actually erased and replaced Britain’s landed class (although the invaders often married the daughters of the conquered.) So for centuries England was governed by a culturally Francophile aristocracy whose first (sometimes only) language was French. The court spoke French, and so their upper echelon clergy and the retainers of the feudal landowners learned French. This went on for around three centuries until eventually it became a kind of Franglais that the French themselves found amusing. By then, this influence had changed the vocabulary used even by the commoners of south-east England. But the RP of England would probably have continued to be this Anglo-French but for the Black Death. At the time, to be literate was to be able to read and write in Latin (even terrible dog-Latin) or French. But the Plague caused such a shortage of literate people (cleric and clerk was still usually the same thing) that instead of speaking French and writing records, contracts, legal paperwork etc in French and Latin, they had to switch to using lower class people who could only speak English, and teach them to write it. But the upper classes, when they began to speak English amongst themselves, still had a radically different accent to almost any other. And then more recently, there arrived the Hanoverian kings, the first three of whom were each raised and educated in German states, in German, and barely spoke English, or refused to speak it publicly. Only Queen Victoria’s immediate forbear was actually raised in England in a partly English-speaking environment. In his restricted social world, raised in a largely German-staffed household, he had a lot of German influence on his English too, and the courtiers already had a couple of previous generations of German-accent imitation under their belts when that aged king died. And then Victoria married a German herself. This is where the “Queens English” comes from. The courtier class whose Francophone influence already gave English about a third of its modern vocabulary, imitating German accents for a century. This is the basis of RP, Oxford and BBC English. It was automatically presumed to be superior because the people who spoke it were in absolutely no doubt of their personal moral and intellectual superiority. And this is why ignorant schoolteachers in places like Scotland, where even the Old English and Middle English had a different mix of origal inputs - still assume to this day that what kids in Scotland speak is a faulty form of English - and they usually presume that it is derived from England’s upper caste and has degenerated locally.

give it time

I will