The Myth of the Neutral Accent
There is no such thing as speaking without an accent; there are only accents that a given audience has stopped noticing. The so-called neutral accent of broadcasting was, for much of the twentieth century, simply the speech of a narrow social group, elevated to a standard less by any intrinsic clarity than by the prestige of those who used it.
That its dominance has since eroded is often presented as a triumph of inclusivity, and in part it is. Yet one should be wary of the opposite assumption, namely that judgements about speech have ceased to matter. Listeners still draw swift, largely unconscious inferences from pronunciation, about competence, warmth and origin, and those inferences have merely become harder to name now that it is unfashionable to voice them.