Come awf it
The ‘awf’ sound for ‘off,’ and similarly ‘orf’ for ‘off,’ ‘larst’ for ‘last.’ ‘gorn’ for ‘gone,’ is a feature of what linguists call Conservative RP, the most elevated form of Received Pronunciation, historically associated with the aristocracy and older generations. Mainstream RP is the most common version heard today.
This upper-class accent did not emerge naturally from a region; it was deliberately constructed as a social marker. The actual character of RP developed as a partly conscious and partly unconscious attempt by upper-class speakers to distinguish themselves from those of the ‘lower orders.’
If people in the South-West pronounced the 'r' after a vowel, cultured speakers would not. If people up North said ‘bath’ with a short 'a', cultured speakers would make it long: ‘bahth.’ The ‘awf’ vowel follows the same logic, an exaggeratedly backed and rounded vowel that marked the speaker as belonging to a particular social stratum.
Until the 1980s, received pronunciation, aka ‘BBC English,’ was the speech of the upper-middle and upper classes, with any regional accent marking the speaker as working or lower-middle class. This led social climbers to hire elocution tutors to iron the kinks out of their local accents.
It is disappearing quite rapidly. Research using computer algorithms to analyse the voices of adults aged 18 to 33 shows how far Britons have departed from the overtly class-based post-war accents epitomised by the clipped vowels in the King's English of BBC presenters and the working-class Cockney of film stars such as Michael Caine and Barbara Windsor. Strikingly, both Cockney and received pronunciation ‘did not appear in the analysis’ of younger speakers because they were ‘too few and far between for the algorithm to identify.’
Traditional RP, never spoken by more than about 5% of the population of England, has now fallen to about 2%. Indeed, because of the status of RP as the default accent in teaching English as a foreign language, you are nowadays much more likely to hear it spoken in Moscow or Buenos Aires than in London.
The replacement is something called Standard Southern English or Estuary English, a middle-ground accent that blends elements of RP and Cockney without being strongly associated with either class extreme. The shift in accents is a result of increased movement of people resulting in greater contact between dialects, the growth of universal education and literacy, and people buying into the idea that there is a ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ way of speaking.
If you hear someone saying ‘awf’ today, they are almost certainly either elderly, or trying to distinguish themself from the common herd. Heightened RP, the far more strangulated, plummy variety, is generally only encountered in older people. Elizabeth II originally used it, whereas her grandchildren use the more relaxed Moderate RP. The class signal that ‘awf’ sends is still understood, but the speakers are dying out, as are many of the varieties of snobbery that sent signals to the like-minded that they were better than others.
Madsen Pirie