When I learned French as a schoolboy I was struck by the way they didn't pronounce the consonants. A word such as aiment is pronounced merely as 'em.' Ils jouaient (they played) is pronounced 'eel zhew-eh.' (Connoisseurs might note all of the 5 vowels next to each other. Can anyone name an English word in which this happens?)

Naturally we all felt slightly superior to the French who wasted all of those consonants and quite a lot of vowels. Not any more. As I listen to the English language as spoken in England, still perhaps the world's third source of English after America and India, I notice how like French it is becoming. I don't mean its incorporation of words such as 'souvenir,' which is English for le keepsake. I refer to its pronunciation.

The various class and regional accents have been bowled over like ninepins (US readers should note these are like ten pins). The conqueror has been Estuary English, in which consonants are dropped to affect ordinary parlance, and to avoid 'talking posh.' One of its characteristics is the use of the glottal stop to elide consonants. It becomes 'glo'al' stop in Estuary English. Butter becomes 'ba'a,' and so on.

People from privileged backgrounds and expensive schools affect Estuary English to avoid standing out. Indeed, where once people took speech classes to make them sound more refined and educated, now they attend them to dumb down their speech.

I suppose it is part of England becoming a society where class and background matter less than ever before. With such a cultural melting pot, I suppose it is an advantage to have a unifying language which everyone can learn. Especially since English is now the world's lingua franca. And even if it does sound awfully French with its willful disregard for so many letters, it does have the advantage of being incomprehensible to foreigners, including the French.