It's the meejuh, alas, Sen, as you say. It's something I've commented on (not here) ere now. Language morphs, diction morphs; under the influence of mass media, I'm afraid it all drifts towards a bland commonality.

Have you ever Kipled, madame? ;-) He often wrote not merely in the vernacular, but attempted to represent speech as it sounded. In his earlier days, there were The Soldiers Three (Mulvaney - Ortheris - Learoyd; Oirish - Corknee - Yaaarkshure). Towards the end of his career, there was Zussex in a lot of his stories. But that same zlow, zoft tone was also in the idealised schoolboy tales of the much earlier Stalky & Co.

That slow, soft accent is (or was) the southern country accent. All the way from the uttermost West to the uttermost East! I doubt you can find an authentic Ezzex accent now; it's all been overtaken / overlaid by "Estuary" Hinglish. But I have heard it in recordings. It used to be the tone of the whole of southern England. Not just Devon, Dorset, Norfolk & Suffolk; Zussex, Ezzex, Kent & Etc too.

I'd like to say it's been displaced; alas, it hasn't moved, it's disappeared. Mmmmm… where is it? Ahhh… the biggest influence on language is mass media & has been for 40-odd years now. Practically every house now has at least one TV. For many years, we all watched the same small handful of channels, so we all watched the same programmes. The never-watched (Soap operas? ARRRGH!!) Eastenders has been running for 35 years now. Has geezer become more widely used as a result (it must feature from time to time, if it's claiming to be set in the East End)? I imagine so.

I've seen quite a few laments about the dumbing down of English over the years. Let's go back to guising – if you're not familiar with the term, the simplest way of explaining it is to tell you it's adults trick-or-treating. How many words & phrases have we imported from US English because of the number of imported American programmes on our TV screens? We never imported their radio shows (and whilst there's Hollywood, the language of films always tended to be more formal in the days before mass TV). And the mass media effect is no doubt even more exaggerated now by the internet & social media.

The irony is that whilst the BBC long ago abandoned Received Pronunciation, and you hear every accent going on TV these days, we are actually losing the variety of both dialect & accent. Wot's an Essex accent, guv? Because that's what you probably think of, but that isn't the native county accent, which you quite possibly will no longer find at all. The native accent right across the south used to be the sort of soft burr we now associate with 'Zummerzet'. But read any of Kipling's Sussex-set short stories, and you'll hear the authentic Zussex accent as it used to be just a century ago.

They've been displaced partly by the diaspora of better off Londoners having moved out to nicer areas, but also by the homogenising effect of TV. Dialect seemingly is being replaced by slang – the 'secret' language of your sub-culture, rather than the local language of where you live. And that phenomenon is being replicated globally too – why bother teaching your kids your native tongue, when there's only 5,000 speakers? Your national language, spoken by 5 million, and English, spoken globally, are far more useful...

I think that pretty much covers my thoughts on the matter. The only other thing to add is that I've no interest in what some random idiot thinks of Alex Scott's voice, but she's a bloody crap pundit, and she only gets employed (along with Carney, "Ebbers", etc) because the BBC are openly agendaist, and nakedly, blatantly, flagrantly sexist. They do NOT employ male pundits on female team sports; they do not employ male pundits who do not meet their unspoken, unwritten, but extremely obvious 'requirements'. They do employ women who don't meet those requirements, which inescapably leads to the conclusion that the unqualified female pundits are employed solely because they are female... Which is sexist. And if you want to discuss that, I'm happy to explain my thoughts further, but not here, please. Open another thread, don't hijack this one (Sorry, Sen, but the last comments were...).