As an undergraduate at Durham, I would amaze certain persons by understanding every word that the porters, the cleaning ladies and the kitchen staff were saying. In the 1980s and 1990s, County Durham would have been Matt Goodwin's dream come true, and I went right through the state school system here with people who did at least as well as I did while speaking a home dialect that would have been completely incomprehensible to people from Hertfordshire, although having been born into television had dramatically toned it down from the speech of their grandparents. Last year, most of my classmates' home wards, where numerous of them still live while still speaking like that, returned Reform UK Councillors, including Darren Grimes.
We send children to school at all because they have such absorbent minds, and well before they had left primary school, everyone had my own native level proficiency in British Standard English, knowing intuitively when to use what. Look how many doctors born, educated and trained in this country have come from homes where an Asian or, increasingly, an African language was spoken. Like a lot of academics, Goodwin thinks that he is an expert on everything. He is not, and if he grew up in an entirely Home Counties-speaking milieu, then he has led a very sheltered life by any standard that has ever obtained in England.
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