Upper Class accent

Question:
Can anyone provide any information why the "upper class" accent in England differs so much from other regional accents. Are there historical links through nobility and royalty with accents spoken in other European countries?

Answer:
No links. But what exactly do you mean by "the 'upper class' accent? If Received Pronunciation, perhaps in an extreme form, then it developed from a regional accent, the English of South and South-East England.

This became a class accent in the 19th century, when most boys from wealthy families were sent away to boarding school from the age of 7 to 18, many of them then going on to Oxford or Cambridge Universities or into the officers' messes of �lite regiments. Girls from similar families were taught by governesses with the same accent and then went off to Paris or Rome where they mixed with others like themselves. The restricted social groups within which these people moved confirmed and exaggerated their shared accent, which differed markedly from the regional accents of their own counties. Even today, a Scottish aristocrat will probably speak with a non-Scottish "upper class" accent, as modelled by his parents and his friends.

Middle-class families adopted a less extreme version of the same non-regional accent, and it is this version that appears in British dictionaries as standard. Most middle-class (not just "upper class") Southerners sound "la-di-dah" or affected to those who speak in other accents, especially Northerners. For some years, however, there has been a tendency for speakers of RP or its upper-class exaggeration to modify their speech in the direction of current South-East urban demotic, creating the so-called "Estuary English" heard, for example, from the Prime Minister. This is not a regional accent, and some who use it in public slip back into "upper class" in private. Very noticeably, young people whose families speak in RP or hyper-RP often adopt Estuary English during their teens and twenties but then revert in full adulthood to their old "upper class" speech.