LONDON, July 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Speech is one of humanity's greatest gifts -- but it has now been revealed that almost three quarters (73 per cent) of people in Britain don't like the sound of their own voices.

Given the chance to change the way they talk, most Brits would prefer to sound like the Queen, while only one in twenty would like to speak Cockney.

The problem is at its worst in Birmingham. Brum, made famous world-wide by foul mouthed Ozzy Ozbourne, not only tops the league of regions where people dislike their own accents, it is also bottom of the league of voices other Brits would like to exchange for their own. Only one per cent of Brits would choose to speak like a Brummy.

Said Tony Robinson, SpinVox linguistic expert: "It seems Britain is being gripped by an epidemic of accent envy and accent self loathing. After decades where dialect diversity has been celebrated, the majority of Brits now aspire to Received Pronunciation (RP) and to share the sound of their voice not only with The Queen but with celebs like Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant."

A poll* of more than 2,000 people around Great Britain, by voice-to-content company SpinVox, found that after the Queen's accent, most Brits would choose an Irish accent, followed by Scottish.

When it comes to who actually does like the sound of their own voice, the Scots, Geordies and Welsh take the podium positions.

Overall the Queen's English is the most popular accent in Great Britain.

Tony Robinson continued: "Accents are intricately tied into our own sense of identity. It's interesting that those with distinct cultural or class identities are more satisfied with the way they speak and it's precisely those accents that the rest of us want to acquire. The fact is that English as spoken in the UK is incredibly dynamic, precisely because of the regional variations in the way we speak. We are still seeing new words being added to our D2 system's dictionary at the rate of thousands per week. 70 percent of those words are not even contained in published English dictionaries."

Tell us your favorite accent and win

We'd love to know what your favorite accent is and why. Visit http://lovetheaccent.com to listen to the nation's favorite accents and add your own.

http://lovetheaccent.com is powered by the mobile blogging site Moblog. Moblog lets you easily upload and share images and videos you record on your mobile phone, and even keep a voice blog using SpinVox.

'Voice-to-Content', the process of automatically converting the spoken word into the written word is one of the fastest-growing telecommunications trends of 2008. In less than two years, SpinVox has converted over 50 million voice messages in four languages and on four continents, delivering them as SMS texts, emails, blogs or posts on social network walls and spaces.

    * Total sample size was 2,181 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 4th
      -- 7th July 2008.  The survey was carried out online. The figures have
      been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

About SpinVox

SpinVox(R) brought together the two most popular methods of communication -- voice and text -- and created a new category of messaging called Voice-to-Screen(TM). Its award-winning service is now making everyday communication simpler and more powerful, creating new recurring revenues for wireless, landline, cable and VOIP carriers as well as service providers and web partners. SpinVox has already launched its service with Alltell, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa and Six Apart and announced deals with Vodafone Spain and Skype. As a managed service provider any network or service can rapidly and cost-effectively implement SpinVox.

At the heart of SpinVox is its Voice Message Conversion System(TM) (VMCS), which works by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process. VMCS is being rolled-out across four continents in four languages -- English, French, Spanish and German.

SOURCE SpinVox