Article: How to get the perfect voice without losing your accent; Before her Christmas Day speech last year the Queen was accused of talking cockney by linguistic experts. As we wait to see whether she will revert to Queen's English this time, Jill Tunstall discovers what it takes to talk proper.(Features)

I USED to think my accent was classless, regionless and ageless until an ex-colleague once told me, bluntly, that I had flat northern vowels.

I was crushed! Goodness knows why.

I've lived in the north all my life, so what did I expect? But with Cheshire parents, a Derbyshire upbringing and a decade in North Wales it's a bit of a Heinz 57.

A friend who has since married a millionaire now talks like Joyce Grenfell on a bad day, but I've never felt inclined to adopt a ridiculous stage posh. So when it comes to accents mine is not so much cut glass, as the type you used to get with petrol tokens. Plain. Or so it seemed.

Leslie Riskowitz ...

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