Received Pronunciation

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Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language which has been long perceived as uniquely prestigious amongst British accents.

The earlier mentions of the term can be found in H. C. Wyld's A Short History of English (1914) and in Daniel Jones's An Outline of English Phonetics, although the latter stated that he only used the term "for want of a better".^[1] According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), the term is "the Received Pronunciation". The word received conveys its original meaning of accepted or approved — as in "received wisdom".^[2]

Received Pronunciation may be referred to as the Queen's (or King's) English, on the grounds that it is spoken by the monarch. It is also sometimes referred to as BBC English, because it was traditionally used by the BBC, yet nowadays these notions are slightly misleading. Queen Elizabeth II uses one specific form of English, whilst BBC presenters and staff are no longer bound by one type of accent, nor is "Oxbridge" (the universities of Oxford and Cambridge).

RP is an accent (a form of pronunciation), not a dialect (a form of vocabulary and grammar). It may show a great deal about the social and educational background of a person who uses English. A person using the RP will typically speak Standard English although the reverse is not necessarily true (i.e., the standard language may be spoken in regional accents).

In recent decades, many people have asserted the value of other regional and class accents. Many members (particularly the younger) of the groups that traditionally used Received Pronunciation have, to varying degrees, begun to use it less. Many regional accents are now heard on the BBC.

RP is often believed to be based on Southern accents, but in fact it has most in common with the dialects of the south-east Midlands: Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire.^[3][4] Migration to London in the 14th and 15th centuries was mostly from the counties directly north of London rather than those directly south. There are differences both within and among the three counties mentioned, but a conglomeration emerged in London, and also mixed with some elements of Essex and Middlesex speech. By the end of the 15th century, Standard English was established in the City of London.^[5]

Contents 1 Usage 2 Status 3 Phonology 3.1 Consonants 3.2 Vowels 4 Historical variation 5 Comparison to other varieties 6 See also 7 References 8 Bibliography 9 External links

[edit] Usage

Today, overall, RP has three different forms: Conservative, Mainstream, and Contemporary.^{[citation needed]}

Conservative RP refers to a traditional accent which is associated with older speakers and the aristocracy. This is sometimes known as "High British". RP is not the accent of any particular locality, yet it is closer to the native accent of some counties than others. A strong RP accent usually indicates someone who attended public school.

Mainstream RP is an accent that is often considered neutral regarding age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker, whilst Contemporary RP refers to speakers using features typical of younger-generation speakers. However, these days, there is almost no difference between those two. It should be noted that whilst Conservative RP was largely acquired through elocution sessions, neither Mainstream nor Contemporary RP forms are, and as such, it is often possible to locate the regional origin of the speaker: the untrimmed edges are audible in certain elements of their speech. Even so, most Mainstream/Contemporary RP exponents are unaware of this and would be very unlikely to admit to producing relics of a regional background.

The modern style of RP is the usual accent taught to non-native speakers learning British English. Non-RP Britons abroad may modify their pronunciation to something closer to Received Pronunciation, in order to be understood better by people who themselves learned RP in school. They may also modify their vocabulary and grammar to be closer to Standard English, for the same reason. RP is used as the standard for English in most books on general phonology and phonetics and is represented in the pronunciation schemes of most dictionaries.

[edit] Status

Traditionally, Received Pronunciation was a manufactured accent of English published as the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public boarding-schools"^[6] and which conveys no information about that speaker's region of origin prior to attending the school. However, this form of Received Pronunciation is a construct of its period of creation during the 19th Century, its pronunciation based upon Court English, and aimed at a rising educated middle class.^{[citation needed]}

It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed.

A. Burrell, Recitation. A Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary School, 1891.

For many years, the use of Received Pronunciation was considered to be a trait of education. 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, Leeds University in Leeds using an RP accent; Morningside, Edinburgh and Kelvinside in Glasgow had Scottish "pan loaf" variations of the RP accent aspiring to a similar prestige).

From the 1970s onwards, attitudes towards Received Pronunciation have been slowly changing. Among one of the primary catalysts for this was the influence in the 1960s of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.^{[citation needed]} Unusually for a prime minister, he spoke with a strong regional Yorkshire accent. The BBC's use of announcers with strong regional accents during and after WW2 (in order to distinguish BBC broadcasts from German propaganda) is an earlier example of the use of non-RP accents.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Consonants

When consonants appear in pairs, fortis consonants (i.e. aspirated or voiceless) appear on the left and lenis consonants (i.e. lightly voiced or voiced) appear on the right

Consonant phonemes of Received Pronunciation^[7]

	Bilabial	Labio- dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal1	m			n			ŋ
Plosive	p  b			t  d			k  g
Affricate					tʃ  dʒ
Fricative		f  v	θ  ð2	s  z	ʃ  ʒ			h3
Approximant				ɹ1, 4		j	w
Lateral				l1, 5

1. Nasals and liquids may be syllabic in unstressed syllables.
2. /ð/ is more often a weak dental plosive; the sequence /nð/ is often realized as [n̪n̪].
3. /h/ becomes [ɦ] between voiced sounds.
4. /ɹ/ is postalveolar unless devoicing results in a voiceless fricative articulation (see below).
5. /l/ is velarized in the syllable coda.

Unless preceded by /s/, fortis plosives (/p/, /t/, and /k/) are aspirated before stressed vowels; when a sonorant /l/, /ɹ/, /w/, or /j/ follows, this aspiration is indicated by partial devoicing of the sonorant.^[8]

Syllable final /p/, /t/, /tʃ/, and /k/ are preceded by a glottal stop (see Glottal reinforcement); /t/ may be fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before a syllabic nasal (button [bɐʔn̩]).^[9][10]

[edit] Vowels

Monophthongs

	Front		Central		Back
	long	short	long	short	long	short
Close	iː	ɪ			uː	ʊ
Mid		ɛ	ɜː	ə	ɔː
Open		æ		ʌ	ɑː	ɒ

Examples of short vowels: /ɪ/ in kit and mirror, /ʊ/ in put, /ɛ/ in dress and merry, /ʌ/ in strut and curry, /æ/ in trap and marry, /ɒ/ in lot and orange, /ə/ in ago and sofa.

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

RP's long vowels are slightly diphthongised. Especially the high vowels /iː/ and /uː/ which are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs [ɪi] and [ʊu].^{[citation needed]}

"Long" and "short" are relative to each other. Because of phonological process affecting vowel length, short vowels in one context can be longer than long vowels in another context.^[11] For example, a long vowel following a fortis consonant sound (/p/, /k/, /s/, etc.) is shorter; reed is thus pronounced [ɹiːd̥] while heat is [hiʔt].^{[citation needed]}

Conversely, the short vowel /æ/ becomes longer if it is followed by a lenis consonant. Thus, bat is pronounced [b̥æʔt] and bad is [b̥æːd̥]. In natural speech, the plosives /t/ and /d/ may be unreleased utterance-finally, thus distinction between these words would rest mostly on vowel length.^[10]

In addition to such length distinctions, unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralized than stressed ones. In unstressed syllables occurring before vowels and in final position, contrasts between long and short high vowels are neutralized and short [i] and [u] occur.^[12]

Diphthong	Example
Closing
/eɪ/	/beɪ/	bay
/aɪ/	/baɪ/	buy
/ɔɪ/	/bɔɪ/	boy
/əʊ/	/bəʊ/	beau
/aʊ/	/bɹaʊz/	browse
Centring
/ɪə/	/bɪə/	beer
/eə/	/beə/	bear
/ʊə/	/bʊə/	boor

Before World War II, /ɔə/ appeared in words like door but this has largely disappeared, having merged with /ɔː/; /ʊə/ is also beginning to merge with /ɔː/.^[13] In the closing diphthongs, the glide is often so small as to be undetectable so that day and dare can be narrowly transcribed as [d̥e̞ː] and [d̥ɛː] respectively.^[14]

RP also possesses the triphthongs /aɪə/ as in ire and /aʊə/ as in hour. The realizations sketched in the following table are not phonemically distinctive, though the difference between /aʊə/, /ɑɪə/, and /ɑː/ may be neutralised to become [ɑː] or [äː].

Triphthongs^[10]

As two syllables	Triphthong	Loss of mid-element	Further simplified as
[aɪ.ə]	[aɪə]	[aːə]	[aː]
[ɑʊ.ə]	[ɑʊə]	[ɑːə]	[ɑː]

Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription. In particular:^{[citation needed]}

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

Most of these variants are used in the transcription devised by Clive Upton for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and now used in many other Oxford University Press dictionaries.

[edit] Historical variation

Like all accents, RP has changed over time. For example, 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 would 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 an [ɛ]-like vowel in words like land.^[15] (It is partly because of this change that Upton's system uses the symbol /a/ for this phoneme.)^{[citation needed]}

Before World War II, the vowel of cup was a back vowel close to cardinal [ʌ] but has since shifted forward to a central position so that [ɐ] is more accurate; phonetic transcription of this vowel as <ʌ> is common partly for historical reasons.^[16]

Some old-fashioned forms of RP, still occasionally heard from older speakers, have other variations in their phonology including words like off, cloth, gone being pronounced with /ɔː/ instead of /ɒ/ (See lot-cloth split) and a distinction between horse and hoarse with an extra diphthong /ɔə/ appearing in words like hoarse, force, and pour.

The change in RP may even be observed in the home of "BBC English". The BBC accent from the 1950s was distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is instantly recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is often used for comic effect in TV or radio programmes wishing to satirize outdated social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr Cholmondley-Warner" sketches.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Comparison to other varieties

• Unlike most forms of English English and 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 except among those who have acquired this distinction as the result of speech training. R.A.D.A. (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), based in London, still teaches these two sounds as distinct phonemes.
• Unlike many other varieties of English English, there is no h-dropping in words like head or herb.
• 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 many forms of American English.
• The flapped variant of /t/, /d/ (as in much of the West Country and the Cape Coloured dialect of South Africa) is not used. In traditional RP [ɾ] is an allophone of /r/ (used only intervocalically). ^[17]

[edit] See also

• Accent (linguistics)
• Prestige dialect
• The Queen's English Society
• English English
• Estuary English
• General American
• Cockney
• Prescription and description

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Crystal, David (2003), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2 ed.), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521530334
• Elmes, Simon (2005), Talking for Britain: A journey through the voices of our nation, Penguin Books Ltd, ISBN 0140515623
• Jones, Daniel (1917), written at London, English Pronouncing Dictionary
• Roach, Peter (2004), "British English: Received Pronunciation", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (2): 239-245
• Roca, Iggy & Wyn Johnson (1999), A Course in Phonology, Blackwell Publishing

[edit] External links

• Sounds Familiar? — Listen to examples of received pronunciation on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website
• Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation? - An article by the phonetician J. C. Wells about received pronunciation

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