Estuary English and the Language Change in English

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The prestige of Received Pronunciation has been declined since 1980s, and a social variety called Estuary has emerged and permeated among younger speakers in London. We started the present study in order to decide whether Estuary English could stand as a most influential model of English as a Lingua Franca (hereafter ELF). In 2011 we took linguistic data for analysis from female participants in their 20s, who worked at University College London, and found several linguistic changes undesirable for Japanese students of the English language. Therefore, we concluded that the Estuary variety could not be suitable for the model of ELF. Furthermore, it was confirmed that Estuary English had already been old-fashioned at the Conference on Language Variation and Change held at the University of Sheffield in 2013.