(Redirected from Received pronunciation)
'Received Pronunciation' ('RP') is a form of
pronunciation of the
English language which has been long perceived as uniquely prestigious amongst British
accents and is the usual accent taught to non-native speakers learning British English.
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 this is slightly misleading.
Queen Elizabeth II speaks an almost unique form of English, and the BBC is no longer restricted to one type of accent, nor is "
Oxbridge" (the universities of
Oxford and
Cambridge).
The 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
British English. A person using the RP accent will typically speak
Standard English although the reverse is not necessarily true.
In recent decades, many people have asserted the value of other regional and class accents, and many members (particularly young ones) of the groups that traditionally used Received Pronunciation have used it less, to varying degrees. 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] 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.
[4]
Usage
Today, overall, RP has three different forms: Conservative RP, Mainstream RP and Contemporary (or Advanced) RP.
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 went to a
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, in these days, there is almost no difference between those two.
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.
Change in time
Except in the last bastions of "real" RP use, the pronunciation has in fact changed over time. For instance, foreigners learning their English accents from Royal speeches would find they are looked at very strangely in the streets of Britain, because the Queen's "speech voice" has changed little since the 1950s, and now sounds archaic even to most people who would consider that they speak "correctly" (i.e. RP).
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 '50s 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. Cholmondeley-Warner" sketches.
Changing status of Received Pronunciation
Traditional status
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.
:''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. It was a 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.)
Changing attitudes
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 during 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. BBC reporters no longer need to, and often do not, use Received Pronunciation, which in some contexts may sound out of place, and be discouraged in favour of less "cultivated" accents.
Phonology
Consonants
A table containing the
consonant phonemes is given below
Vowels
Typical traditional RP vowels on the
cardinal vowel table, based on Gimson (1970).
The
vowel phonemes of Received Pronunciation are shown in the following tables:
Examples: in ''kit'' and ''mirror'', in ''foot'' and ''put'', in ''dress'' and ''merry'', in ''strut'' and ''curry'', in ''trap'' and ''marry'', in ''lot'' and ''orange'', in the first syllable of ''ago'' and in the second of ''sofa''.
Examples: in ''fleece'', in ''goose'', in ''nurse'' and ''bird'', in ''north'' and ''thought'', in ''father'' and ''start''.
RP's long vowels are slightly diphthongised. Especially the vowels and which are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs and .
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 which becomes halfway between long and short. e.g. Burt = , seat = , garth = .
The short vowel becomes longer if it is followed by a voiced consonant sound. Thus, in narrow transcription ''bat'' = and ''bad'' = . In natural speech, the plosives and may be unreleased utterance-finally, thus distinction between these words would rest mostly on vowel length.
[5]
'Diphthongs' | Second component
close front | Second component
close back | Second component
central |
|---|
| 'First component close front' | | | |
| 'First component is mid-open front' | | | |
| 'First component is mid-central' | | | |
| 'First component is open' | | | |
| 'First component is back and rounded' | | | |
Examples: in ''near'' and ''theatre'', in ''face'', in ''square'' and ''Mary'', in ''goat'', in ''price'', in ''mouth'', in ''choice'', in ''tour''.
The off-glide of (and also the off-glides of /ij/ and /uw/) can be predicted by a phonological rule and so are not represented in some
underlying representations.
There are also the
triphthongs as in ''fire'' and as in ''tower''. The realizations sketched in the following table are not phonemically distinctive, though the difference between and may be
neutralised under or
'Triphthongs'| As two syllables: | Tripthong: | Loss of mid-element: | Further simplified as: |
|---|
| | | |
| | | |
Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription. In particular
★ as in ''trap'' is often written .
★ as in ''dress'' is often written .
★ as in ''nurse'' is sometimes written .
★ as in ''price'' is sometimes written .
★ as in ''mouse'' is sometimes written
★ as in ''square'' is sometimes written , and is also sometimes treated as a long monophthong .
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.
Characteristics
★ Unlike most forms of
English English and
American English, RP is a
broad A accent, so words like ''bath'' and ''chance'' appear with and not .
★ RP is a
non-rhotic accent, meaning 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 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.
★ RP uses , called
dark l, when 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
[6] that "General American" speakers use the both finally and initially.)
★ 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 , and . Hence, for example, ''new'', ''tune'' and ''dune'' are pronounced , and rather than , and . This contrasts with many East Anglian and
East Midland varieties of
English English and with many forms of
American English.
★ The has a strong aspiration () in word-initial and word-final positions. In word-medial positions, the aspiration is weakened, and may be lost altogether (). The unaspirated variant may be misunderstood as /d/ in an American speaker.
★ 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 is an allophone of /r/ (used only intervocalically).
★ The phoneme in words like ''bluntness'' is often realised as a
glottal stop ( ).
★ The allophone of /t/ (common in
Cockney) is not used in words like ''butter''.
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 sound, as in ''land'', with a vowel close to , 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 an -like vowel in words like ''land''. (It is partly because of this change that
Upton's system uses the symbol for this phoneme.)
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 , a
near-open central vowel. The symbol <> is still used, possibly because of tradition or the fact that some speakers retain the older pronunciation.
Some old-fashioned forms of RP, still occasionally heard from older speakers, have other variations in their phonology.
★ Words like ''off'', ''cloth'', ''gone'' are pronounced with instead of . See
lot-cloth split.
★ The
horse-hoarse merger does not occur, with an extra diphthong appearing in words such as ''hoarse'', ''force'', ''pour''.
See also
★
Accent (linguistics)
★
Prestige dialect
★
English English
★
Estuary English
★
General American
★
Prescription and description
★
Cockney
References
1. David Crystal, ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'', p.365
2. British Library website, "Sounds Familiar?" section
3. Simon Elmes, "Talking for Britain: A journey through the voices of our nation", p.114. Also http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/voices2005/glossary/barrie_rhodes.shtml
4. David Crystall, "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language", p.54-55
5. GIMSON, A. C. ‘An Introduction to the pronunciation of English,' London : Edward Arnold, 1970.
6. Wise, Claude Merton. Introduction to phonetics. Englewood- Cliffs, 1957.
External links
★
Sounds Familiar? — Listen to examples of received pronunciation on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website
★
Anthony Richardson - OverVoice A prominent English voice over artist specialising in Received Pronunciation - listen to samples.
★
Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation? - An article by the phonetician
J. C. Wells about received pronunciation
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