CRAIG BROWN: Come orf it, Herry, you sound like a bad Dick Van Dyke

Is Prince Harry gradually losing his English accent? The first indication that the process might have begun came in 2018, when he introduced his son Archie to the public.

‘Wow, he’s already got a LIDDLE bit of facial hair,’ he cooed, pronouncing ‘little’ as though it had two ‘d’s in the middle.

First published at the beginning of 2023, his autobiography, Spare, is riddled with Americanisms. On just one page, chosen at random, up pop the expressions: ‘good weed’, ‘dude’, ‘yeah’ and ‘kinda’.

The book was ghost-written for Harry by an American author, J.R. Moehringer, so it’s possible that some of these Americanisms were Moehringer’s, rather than Harry’s. But this year, Harry has begun using American expressions while speaking. 

He says ‘awesome’, ‘dude’ (which he pronounces ‘dood’) and ‘you guys’. And he pronounces ‘arse’ with a sharp ‘a’, the American way: ‘ass’.

In this, Prince Harry is following his great-great uncle, The Duke of Windsor, who also married an American and moved abroad. In an interview in exile in France 1969, the Duke can be heard pronouncing the syllable ‘prog’ in the word ‘progress’ to rhyme with ‘frog’. He pronounced the words ‘command’, ‘example’ and ‘brass’ with short ‘a’s, as in ‘back’.

He also pronounced ‘new’ as ‘noo’. ‘Establishment was a noo word to me until about 15 years ago,’ he told the BBC interviewer. Oddly enough, he pronounced ‘ago’ as ‘agow’, which makes him sound rather like Dick Van Dyke playing Bert, the cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, or ‘Meereh Puppins’.

Unlike Prince Harry, the Duke of Windsor never lived in America, so his creeping Americanisms must have come from his wife – who always called him The Dook – rather than from his adopted country, which was France.

The Duke of Windsor’s own grandfather, King Edward VII, spoke in an accent that betrayed the Royal Family’s German roots. 

Prince Harry’s great-great uncle, The Duke of Windsor, pronounced ‘ago’ as ‘agow’, which makes him sound rather like Dick Van Dyke playing Bert, the cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, or ‘Meereh Puppins’

Spare was ghost-written for Harry by an American author, J.R. Moehringer, so it’s possible that some of these Americanisms were Moehringer’s, rather than Harry’s

His biographer Jane Ridley says that, in the nursery, he and his siblings ‘spoke German like their native tongue, even to one another… His fluency in German interfered with his speaking of English’. So much so, that an actor was employed to teach him elocution.But by the age of 16, his foreign accent was still very noticeable.

 The writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm reported that, ‘He spoke with a heavy German accent, very guttural’. For instance, instead of saying ‘why?’ he always said, ‘vy?’

Of course, most accents change with the times, however stable we may imagine them to be. During the war, when she was 14, Prince Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, delivered a message on the radio to children who had been evacuated. 

‘Thaisands of yew in thees countreh hev hed to leave your haimes and be separated from your fathers and methers,’ is close to how she sounds.

A decade later, on her 1951 Commonwealth tour, she gave a speech in which she announced, ‘Em gled to be eble to thenk once again air hosts all raind the glaibe’. 

She begins an early Christmas broadcast, ‘Heppy Christmas’ and then mentions that ‘May ain femileh awfen gether rarn to watch television… end that is hay I imagine you now.’

Penny Dyer, Helen Mirren’s voice coach for the film The Queen, felt that her accent was at least partly determined by her ingrained sense of duty. 

‘Part of that stiff upper lip, which is all about not being allowed to show emotion, putting duty before emotion, which is absolutely what you have to do when you grow up in the Royal Family…you are literally frozen, so that the vowel shapes, that are normally rounded, like “oh” and “ow” and “o” and “awe”, you lose the lip rounding – the actual stiff upper lip gives you what is called a lateral fix.’

First published at the beginning of 2023, Harry’s autobiography, Spare, is riddled with Americanisms. On just one page, chosen at random, up pop the expressions: ‘good weed’, ‘dude’, ‘yeah’ and ‘kinda’

Helen Mirren as the Queen. Penny Dyer, Helen Mirren’s voice coach for the film The Queen, felt that the late Queen’s accent was at least partly determined by her ingrained sense of duty

But over the years, the Queen’s accent subtly altered, becoming more relaxed, less obviously grand. For instance, she no longer pronounced the word ‘lost’ to rhyme with ‘forced’, and where once she had pronounced family ‘femileh’, she now said ‘fam-e-lee’. 

‘Lawst’ changed to ‘lost’, and ‘hames’ to ‘homes’.My friend and fellow columnist Tom Utley points out that royals used to pronounce the letter ‘a’ as ‘e’ – ‘I wish you all a Heppy Christmas’. 

But now Princess Kate and the younger generation pronounce ‘e’ as ‘a’: ‘I wish you all a Varry Marry Christmas’.