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Received Pronunciation (RP), also called the Queen's (or King's) English and BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to that of other European languages. Although there is nothing intrinsic about RP that marks it as superior to any other variety, sociolinguistic factors give Received Pronunciation particular prestige in England and Wales. However, since World War II, a greater permissiveness towards allowing regional English varieties has taken hold in education and in the media in England.
About two percent of Britons speak with the RP accent in its purest form. Abercrombie (1956:44-48) argues that RP use is socially advantageous over other English accents within England but carries no "special privileges" outside England.
The introduction of the term RP is usually credited to Daniel Jones after his comment in 1917 "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation (abbreviation RP), for want of a better term."  However, the expression had actually been used much earlier by Alexander Ellis in 1869  and Peter DuPonceau in 1818.  (The term used by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927 was "received standard".  ) According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), the correct term is "the Received Pronunciation". The word received conveys its original meaning of accepted or approved – as in "received wisdom".
It is sometimes referred to as Oxford English. This was not because it was traditionally the common speech of the city of Oxford, but specifically of Oxford University; the production of dictionaries gave Oxford University prestige in matters of language. The extended versions of the Oxford English Dictionary give Received Pronunciation guidelines for each word.
RP is an accent (a form of pronunciation) and a register, rather than a dialect (a form of vocabulary and grammar as well as pronunciation). It may show a great deal about the social and educational background of a person who uses English. Anyone using the RP will typically speak Standard English although the reverse is not necessarily true (e.g. the standard language may be pronounced with a regional accent, such as a Yorkshire accent; but it is very unlikely that someone speaking RP would use it to speak Scots or Geordie).
RP is often believed to be based on the Southern accents of England, but in fact it has most in common with the Early Modern English dialects of the East Midlands. This was the most populated and most prosperous area of England during the 14th and 15th centuries. By the end of the 15th century, "Standard English" was established in the City of London. A mixture of London speech with elements from East Midlands, Middlesex and Essex, became known as RP.
Researchers generally distinguish between three different forms of RP: Conservative, General, and Advanced. Conservative RP refers to a traditional accent associated with older speakers with certain social backgrounds; General RP is often considered neutral regarding age, occupation, or lifestyle of the speaker; and Advanced RP refers to speech of a younger generation of British speakers.
The modern style of RP is an accent often 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 unfamiliar with British regional accents. 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.
Traditionally, Received Pronunciation was the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public boarding-schools" and which conveys no information about that speaker's region of origin prior to attending the school.
From the 1970s onwards, attitudes towards Received Pronunciation have been changing slowly. One of the catalysts for this was the influence in the 1960s of Harold Wilson, a Labour prime minister. Unusually for a prime minister, he spoke with elements of a Yorkshire accent. The BBC's use of announcers with strong regional accents during and after World War II (in order to distinguish BBC broadcasts from German propaganda) is an earlier example of the use of non-RP accents.
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
|Plosive||p b||t d||k ɡ|
|Fricative||f v||θ ð2||s z||ʃ ʒ||h3|
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.
Syllable finals /p/, /t/, /tʃ/, and /k/ may be preceded by a glottal stop (see Glottal reinforcement); /t/ may be fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before a syllabic nasal (bitten [bɪʔn̩]). The glottal stop may be realised as creaky voice; thus a true phonetic transcription of attempt [əˈtʰemʔt] may be [əˈtʰemm̰t].
Examples of short vowels: /ɪ/ in kit, mirror and rabbit, /ʊ/ in put, /e/ 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 and furry, /ɔː/ in north, force and thought, /ɑː/ in father, bath and start.
"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. For example, a long vowel followed by a fortis consonant sound (/p/, /k/, /s/, etc.) is shorter; reed is thus pronounced [ɹiːd̥] while heat is [hiʔt].
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.
In addition to such length distinctions, unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralised than stressed ones. In unstressed syllables occurring before vowels and in final position, contrasts between long and short high vowels are neutralised and short [i] and [u] occur (e.g. happy [ˈhæpi], throughout [θɹuˈaʊʔt]). The neutralisation is common throughout many English dialects, though the phonetic realisation of e.g. [i] rather than [ɪ] (a phenomenon called happy tensing) is not as universal.
Before World War II, /ɔə/ appeared in words like door but this has largely merged with /ɔː/. "Poor" traditionally had /ʊə/ (and is still listed with only this pronunciation by the OED), but a realisation with /ɔː/ has become more common, see poor-pour merger.. 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.
RP also possesses the triphthongs /aɪə/ as in ire and /aʊə/ as in hour. Different possible realisations of these diphthongs are indicated in the following table: furthermore, the difference between /aʊə/, /aɪə/, and /ɑː/ may be neutralised with both realised as [ɑː] or [äː].
|As two syllables||Triphthong||Loss of mid-element||Further simplified as|
Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription. In particular:
Like all accents, RP has changed with time. For example, sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was usual for speakers of RP to pronounce the /æ/ sound, as in land, with a vowel close to [ɛ], so that land would sound similar to a present-day pronunciation of lend. RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English, but recordings show that even Queen Elizabeth II has changed her pronunciation over the past 50 years, no longer using an [ɛ]-like vowel in words like land.
The 1993 Oxford Dictionary changed three main things in its description of modern RP, although these features can still be heard amongst old speakers of RP. Firstly, words such as cloth, gone, off, often were pronounced with /ɔː/ (as in General American) instead of /ɒ/, so that often sounded close to orphan (See lot-cloth split). The Queen still uses the older pronunciations, but it is rare to hear them on the BBC any more. Secondly, there was a distinction between horse and hoarse with an extra diphthong /ɔə/ appearing in words like hoarse, force, and pour. Thirdly, final y on a word is now represented as an /i/ - a symbol to cover either the traditional /ɪ/ or the more modern /iː/, the latter of which has been common in the south of England for some time.
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.
In the 1960s the transcription /əʊ/ started to be used for the "GOAT" vowel instead of Daniel Jones's /oʊ/, reflecting a change in pronunciation since the beginning of the century. Joseph Wright's work suggests that, during the early 20th century, words such as cure, fewer, pure, etc. were pronounced with a triphthong /iuə/ rather than the more modern /juə/.
The change in RP may even be observed in the home of "BBC English". The BBC accent of the 1950s was distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is used for comic effect in programmes wishing to satirize 1950s social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr. Cholmondley-Warner" sketches. There are several words where the traditional RP pronunciation is now considered archaic: for example, "medicine" was originally said /ˈmedsɪn/ and "tissue" was originally said /ˈtɪsjuː/.
There are, however, several words where a yod has been lost with the passage of time: for example, the words suit and tissue originally had yods in RP but this is now extremely rare.
Received Pronunciation (or RP, or BBC English) is the name given to the standard accent of English used by the BBC. It is also sometimes taught in private schools. Foreign students of British English learn this kind of English at school. The British pronunciation of words given in dictionaries is in received pronunciation. Received pronunciation is used because there are many different accents used in Britain, and people think it is easier to learn to understand one accent than to learn to understand the many different accents.
Received Pronunciation is non-rhotic. This means that in words ending with an 'r', for example car, the final 'r' is not pronounced. Many words have long vowel sounds. For example, the 'a' in 'bath' rhymes is the same as in 'far', not the same as in 'cat'.