Queen's English changing!
We talked in class about apparent-time vs. real-time studies, and I thought this was a very interesting example of the latter, focused entirely on one person--the Queen of England. Because of her televised christmas broadcasts, recordings of her have been public consistently since the 1950s. If you compare the Queen's accent in her 1957 christmas broadcast (http://youtu.be/mBRP-o6Q85s) to the one from 2013 (http://youtu.be/6E4v4Dw5Ags), you can here an enormous difference. This short article says that her accent is moving closer to the standard speech of the area, and that "It demonstrates that the monarchy, at least as far as the spoken accent is concerned, isn't isolated from the rest of the community." It would be very interesting to look at recordings from between then and now, and see how quickly these changes happened.