RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION

Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language which has been the prestige British accent (see prestige dialect). RP is a form of English English, sometimes defined as the "educated spoken English of southeastern England". It is often taught to non-native speakers; used as the standard for English in most books on general phonology and phonetics; and represented in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries.

According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), the term is "the Received Pronunciation". Received Pronunciation was also sometimes referred to as the Queen's English, as it is spoken by the Queen or BBC English as it was traditionally used by the BBC. The term BBC English remains in use today, however it is less frequently than in past decades, as many other accents are now to be heard on the BBC.

In recent decades many people have asserted the value of other regional and class accents, and many younger members of the groups which traditionally used Received Pronunciation have moved away from it to varying degrees. However, it has also undergone frequent change, so that the BBC accent from the 1950s is different from that spoken today on the BBC.

Many Britons abroad modify their accent to make their pronunciation closer to Received Pronunciation, in order to be better understood than if they were using their usual accent. They may also modify their vocabulary and grammar to be closer to Standard English, for the same reason.

Changing status of Received Pronunciation

Traditionally, Received Pronunciation is the accent of English which is "the everyday speech of families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding schools" (Daniel Jones, English Pronouncing Dictionary, 1926—he had earlier called it "Public School Pronunciation"), and which conveys no information about that speaker's region of origin prior to attending the school.

For many years, the use of Received Pronunciation was considered a mark of education. It was standard practice until around the 1950s for university students with regional accents to modify their speech to be closer to RP. As a result, at a time when only around five percent of the population attended universities, elitist notions sprang up around it and those who used it may have considered those who did not to be less educated than themselves. Historically the most prestigious British educational institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, many public schools) were located in England, so those who were educated there would pick up the accents of their peers. (There have always been exceptions: for example, Morningside, Edinburgh and Kelvinside in Glasgow had Scottish “pan loaf" accents aspiring to a similar prestige.)

From the 1970s onwards, attitudes towards Received Pronunciation have been slowly changing. One of the primary catalysts for this was the influence in the 1960s of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. Unusually for a recent prime minister, he spoke with a strong regional Yorkshire accent, exaggerated, some said, to appeal to the working classes his party represented. As a result of the trend begun by Wilson and others in the 1960s, the accents of the English regions and of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are today more likely to be considered to be on a par with Received Pronunciation, which by the turn of the century was only spoken by around three percent of the population. BBC reporters no longer need to, and often do not, use Received Pronunciation, which itself now sounds out of place, and is often discouraged in favour of more "real" accents.

The ongoing spread of Estuary English from the London metropolitan area through the whole South-East, leads some people to believe that this will take the place of Received Pronunciation as the "Standard English accent" of the future. There are, however, important factors that militate against this, including the perceived inferior status and alleged lower intelligibility by some of Estuary English, which is characterised by the dropping of consonants, and use of the glottal stop. Speakers of Received Pronunciation do not all sound alike, and individuals modify their speech to varying degrees. The heightened "cut glass" form of the Received Pronunication is almost non-existent amongst young Britons, and some older RP speakers have also modified their speech. For example it has been demonstrated that in some respects even the Queen no longer speaks the "Queen's English" of the mid 20th century.

Phonology

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Received Pronunciation are shown in the following tables:

Examples: /ɪ/ in kit and mirror, /ʊ/ in foot and put, /e/ in dress and merry, /ʌ/ in strut and curry, /æ/ in trap and marry, /ɒ/ in lot and orange, /ə/ in the first syllable of ago and in the second of sofa.

Examples: /iː/ in fleece, /uː/ in goose, /ɜː/ in nurse and bird, /ɔː/ in north and thought, /ɑː/ in father and start.

RP's long vowels are slightly diphthongized. Especially the vowels /iː/ and /uː/ which are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs [ɪj] and [ʊw].

Although these vowels are traditionally described as long vowels, whereby they have received the <ː> mark after their symbol, the length also varies according to the surrounding sounds. If a long vowel is preceded by a voiceless consonant sound (e.g. /p k s/) its length will be equivalent to that of the short vowels, with the exception of /ɑː/ which becomes halfway between long and short. e.g. Burt = [bɜt], seat = [sit].

The short vowel /æ/ becomes longer if it is followed by a voiced consonant sound. Thus, in narrow transcription bat = [bæt] and bad = [bæːd]. In natural speech, the plosives /t/ and /d/ may be unreleased utterance-finally, thus distinction between these words would rest solely on vowel length.^[1]

Examples: /ɪə/ in near and theatre, /eɪ/ in face, /ɛə/ in square and Mary, /əʊ/ in goat, /aɪ/ in price, /aʊ/ in mouth, /ɔɪ/ in choice, /ʊə/ in cure.

There are also the triphthongs /aɪə/ as in fire and /aʊə/ as in tower.

There are some variations in transcription. In particular

• /æ/ as in trap is often written /a/.
• /e/ as in dress is often written /ɛ/.
• /ɜː/ as in nurse is sometimes written /əː/.
• /aɪ/ as in price is sometimes written /ʌɪ/.
• /aʊ/ as in mouse is sometimes written /ɑʊ/
• /ɛə/ as in square is sometimes written /eə/, and is also sometimes treated as a long monophthong /ɛː/.

Characteristics

• Unlike northern English English and most forms of American English, RP is a broad A accent, so words like bath and chance appear with /ɑː/ and not /æ/.
• RP is a non-rhotic accent, meaning /r/ does not occur unless followed immediately by a vowel.
• Like other accents of southern England, RP has undergone the wine-whine merger so the phoneme /ʍ/ is not present.
• RP uses [ɫ], called dark l, when /l/ occurs at the end of a syllable, as in well, and also for syllabic l, like in little or apple. (whereas it has been reported^[2] that "General American" speakers use the /ɫ/ both finally and initially.)
• The /t/ phoneme in words like butter is pronounced as [tʰ] rather than flapped (as in most forms of American English) or [ʔ] as in Cockney and similar varieties of English).
• The /t/ phoneme in words like bluntness is often pronounced as or realised as a glottal stop.
• Unlike many other varieties of English English, there is no h-dropping in words like head.
• RP does not have yod dropping after /n/, /t/ and /d/. Hence, for example, new, tune and dune are pronounced /njuː/, /tjuːn/ and /djuːn/ rather than /nuː/, /tuːn/ and /duːn/. This contrasts with many East Anglian and East Midland varieties of English English and with most forms of American English.

Historical variation

The form of RP has itself changed over the past decades. Sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was standard to pronounce the /æ/ sound, as in land, with a vowel close to [ɛ], so that land could sound similar to lend. RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English, but recordings show that even the Queen has changed her pronunciation over the past 50 years, no longer using a [ɛ]-like vowel in words like land. Before World War II, the vowel in words like putt and sun was an open-mid back unrounded vowel; This sound has since shifted to [ɐ], a near-open central vowel. The symbol <ʌ> is still used, possibly due to tradition or the fact that other dialects retain the older pronunciation.

Some old-fashioned forms of RP have some variations in their phonology.

• Words like off, cloth, gone can be pronounced with /ɔː/ instead of /ɒ/. See lot-cloth split.
• The horse-hoarse merger may not have occurred, with an extra diphthong /ɔə/ appearing in words such as hoarse, force, mourning.

See also

• Accent (linguistics)
• Prestige dialect
• English English
• Estuary English
• General American
• Prescription and description
• Cockney

References

1. ^ GIMSON, A. C. ‘An Introduction to the pronunciation of English,' London : Edward Arnold, 1970.
2. ^ Merton, Claude Introduction to Phonetics

External links

• Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation? - An article by the phonetician J. C. Wells about received pronunciation