Doing Diction.

This little clip from The Old Dark House is interesting if for no other reason than that the way Ernest Thesiger speaks amounts to an object lesson in archaic English pronunciation. His diction is of a form that largely disappeared after WWII when a more egalitarian ethos came to the fore. Note how he rolls his Rs, how he pronounces ‘cut off’ and how he sounds the second ‘i’ in ‘civilised.’

Even the posh folks no longer roll their Rs, and neither do they sound the second ‘i’ in ‘civilised.’ The second ‘i’ is now but an obscure phonetic at all levels of society. Speaking like this used to get a person marked out as being of a superior class; now it would be more likely to get them laughed at.