When I was growing up in Scotland in the 1950s, many of my peers were sent to elocution lessons to help them speak “properly” (I had to fight my way through class barriers into my job. Why has so little changed?, 23 November). My mother was obsessed with the need to lose what she, and many of my teachers, referred to as “the language of the gutter”.
The wonderful irony was that growing up in Kilmarnock, with its strong association with the national bard, the focus changed in the run-up to Burns Night. Then, we were all drilled, often by the same elocutionists, in the language and pronunciation of an 18th-century farmer/poet in order to take part in poetry competitions that were treated with some reverence by people who had had their native accent, or even dialect, surgically removed.
