"You went to a private school, am I right?" asks voice trainer Dewi Hughes, immediately placing me in the marzipan (almost uppermost) layer of the British social fruit cake. I did, it's true. But, I plead, I'd much rather sound like the other 98% of the country. As a preliminary exercise, he has me read Christina Rossetti's poem Remember. His verdict? "Two vowels betray your background." My clenched and elongated

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) "oh" and "oo" sounds, he says, are the tip-off that I'm a toff.

So why don't I want to sound privileged? For starters, I'm not. I'm just plain middle class, but I talk as if my family live in a stately home and don't have to work. My ancestors were mainly teachers, vicars, profs and bishops — careers which might require a top-of-the-range voice. That may explain why I speak a distinctly upmarket version of received pronunciation (RP) — shorthand for the standard English of bbc newsreaders. Which is fine if you want to marry a landowner or work in a top art auction house, but not so much fun if you just want to fade into the background. People make assumptions: men think I'll boss them, employers think I'll try and run the place, strangers think I'll look down on them — so they get the boot in first.

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him," wrote Irishman George Bernard Shaw in the preface to Pygmalion, the play that became My Fair Lady. In England, the way you say "oh" or "oo" can make you one of the gang — or the designated buffoon.

We're at King Street College in west London, where Hughes, who has an M.A. from the Central School of Speech and Drama, coaches native and non-native English speakers. Janey Futerill, the college's principal, dismisses the commonly held view that elocution teaching "died in 1945." She initially offered the service to non-native students of English who had a good grasp of the language but were reduced to "flipping burgers" because nobody could understand them. "Some just want to sound more British, or don't want to be labeled. They want to blend in."

No one, it seems, wants to stand out from the crowd. Despite premature announcements of a classless society, plenty of native English speakers still want to lose or lessen regional accents. Professionals call this "accent smoothing" or "accent softening." Students usually want to go up the social scale, and a certain type of voice may be essential in some fields. One lawyer from the north of England who approached Futerill "felt the legal profession was still very upper middle class, and not speaking RP was a distinct disadvantage," she says. It's a common perception. According to the Department of Trade and Industry's Fair Treatment at Work Survey 2005 (published this June), accent was named as a cause of unfair treatment more often than race, gender or religion. "Students generally want RP," Hughes says. "Some want to sound like the people they work with — the way the majority of educated Londoners speak." He calls it "lazy RP," using less precision than a newsreader.

So is lazy RP in the cards for me? Hughes has me read that fine old Cockney ballad My Baby Has Gone Down the Plughole and picks up on the way I always sound the consonant at the end of a word (I pronounce it righ-T, not righ'). According to him, I don't just have a British stiff upper lip but a tense lower one as well. He shows me what I'm doing and it looks uncannily like the Queen, whose voice is even more pinched than mine. He tells me to relax my face by pretending to be the British glamour model Jordan applying lipstick and I can hear an improvement when I say some words that would usually be my downfall: "old school tie" (which I normally drawl, lengthening out the vowels). Hughes agrees that the royal family shares my problems — Prince Charles is so tense that he lives in a "hice" instead of a house.

Hughes says he could bring me down to standard RP, or make my voice more Estuary — a loose term for the London accent that spreads into surrounding counties and is loathed by many for its supposed sloppiness. I'd have to turn my "ow" into more of an "aow," my clipped "beck" into an open "baaack." That means I'd be taking the opposite journey to My Fair Lady's Eliza Doolittle ("It's 'aoow' and 'garn' that keep her in her place," sings Professor Higgins, lamenting Eliza's way with words like "oh" and "go on"). So I have a choice. I could work on my "ohs," "oos" and "ows," and try to be a bit more slack about consonants. Or I could holiday in Essex, east of London, for total Estuary immersion. But somehow I don't think my Dick Van Dyke Cockney chimney sweep impression would fool anyone for a moment.

• LUCY FISHER | Shepherd's Bush
• How you speak still affects your job prospects and social life. Fortunately, help is at hand