Received pronunciation may be dying out – but its passing is
long overdue
The lingua franca of the ‘establishment’ is now only spoken
by a tiny fraction of the population – although the RP tinges of my own accent
often proved beneficial
Laura Barton
Tue 22 May 2018 16.29 BST Last modified on Tue 22 May 2018
22.00 BST
People often talk about the English language as if it is a
thing to keep pretty – a petticoat that might be sullied by the spread of
glottal stops, text-speak or slang. The latest to weigh in is the writer and
critic Jonathan Meades, in a column mourning the decline of received
pronunciation (RP). Meades argues that the accent – also known as the Queen’s
English or BBC English – should be regarded as “a sort of glue, a force for
uniting the country” and “celebrated as a tool of social mobility”.
The term RP has murky origins, but it is regarded as the
accent of those with power, influence, money and a fine education – and was
adopted as a standard by the BBC in 1922. Today, it is used by 2% of the
population.
The idea that an accent should facilitate or hinder a
person’s success is, of course, distasteful, but entirely true: the powerful
elite will recoil from those who sound different from them; those who sound
different feel out of place and unwelcome.
My own accent is slightly confusing. People are frequently
surprised to learn that I come from Lancashire and went to my local
comprehensive – save for the flat vowels of, say, “bath” and “laugh”, I don’t
have much northernness. Often, people assume that I deliberately modified my
accent when I went to Oxford, joined the Guardian or started presenting for the
BBC, but these people were never party to my school years, where I was teased
mercilessly for sounding “posh” and like a “snob”.
The truth is a little plainer: my mum was the esteemed
winner of the elocution prize at her school in Wigan in the 1960s and when my
brother and I were growing up she continually corrected our speech, spurred, I
imagine, by the fear that unless we spoke “properly” we wouldn’t go anywhere.
The world has changed since then, and it’s a world I like
better. The voices we hear on the radio and TV and in positions of power are
slowly shifting and this gladdens me. I would be lying if I said that the RP
tinges of my accent have not helped me move through the world, but also I know
that my shades of Lancastrian have helped, too – at times, each has given me
something to push against; at others, it is my support.
Perhaps these days we are seeing not so much a decline in RP
as a growing accent fluidity. True social mobility should allow us to move in
all directions; to know and welcome all people, to speak and listen to
everyone. Surely that, Mr Meades, should be our glue; our force for uniting the
country?
Received
Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation (RP), commonly called BBC English in
North America and Standard British pronunciation or Southern British
pronunciation by North American scholars, is an accent of Standard English in
the United Kingdom and is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as
"the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England",
although it can be heard from native speakers throughout England and Wales.
Peter Trudgill estimated in 1974 that 3 per cent of people in Britain were RP
speakers, but this rough estimate has been questioned by the phonetician J.
Windsor Lewis. Clive Upton notes higher estimates of 5% (Romaine, 2000) and 10%
(Wells, 1982) but refers to all these as "guestimates" that are not
based on robust research.
Formerly
colloquially called "(the) King's English", RP enjoys high social
prestige in Britain,[8] being thought of as the accent of those with power,
money, and influence, though it may be perceived negatively by some as being
associated with undeserved privilege. Since the 1960s, a greater permissiveness
toward regional English varieties has taken hold in education.
The study of RP
is concerned exclusively with pronunciation, whereas Standard English, the
Queen's English, Oxford English, and BBC English are also concerned with
matters such as grammar, vocabulary, and style.
History
The introduction of the term Received Pronunciation is
usually credited to Daniel Jones. In the first edition of the English
Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), he named the accent "Public School Pronunciation",
but for the second edition in 1926, he wrote, "In what follows I call it
Received Pronunciation, for want of a better term." However, the term had
actually been used much earlier by P. S. Du Ponceau in 1818. A similar term,
received standard, was coined by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927. The early
phonetician Alexander John Ellis used both terms interchangeably but with a
much broader definition than Daniel Jones, having said "there is no such
thing as a uniform eduction pron. of English, and rp. and rs. is a variable
quantity differing from individual to individual, although all its varieties
are 'received', understood and mainly unnoticed".
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'."
RP is often believed to be based on the accents of southern
England, but it actually has most in common with the Early Modern English dialects
of the East Midlands.[citation needed] 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.
Alternative names
Some linguists
have used the term "RP" while expressing reservations about its
suitability. The Cambridge-published English Pronouncing Dictionary (aimed at
those learning English as a foreign language) uses the phrase "BBC
Pronunciation" on the basis that the name "Received
Pronunciation" is "archaic" and that BBC news presenters no
longer suggest high social class and privilege to their listeners. Other
writers have also used the name "BBC Pronunciation".
The phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis frequently criticises the
name "Received Pronunciation" in his blog: he has called it
"invidious", a "ridiculously archaic, parochial and
question-begging term"and noted that American scholars find the term
"quite curious". He used the term "General British" (to
parallel "General American") in his 1970s publication of A Concise
Pronouncing Dictionary of American and British English and in subsequent
publications. Beverley Collins and Inger Mees use the term "Non-Regional
Pronunciation" for what is often otherwise called RP, and reserve the term
"Received Pronunciation" for the "upper-class speech of the
twentieth century". Received Pronunciation has sometimes been called
"Oxford English", as it used to be the accent of most members of the
University of Oxford.[citation needed] The Handbook of the International
Phonetic Association uses the name "Standard Southern British". Page
4 reads:
Standard Southern British (where 'Standard' should not be
taken as implying a value judgment of 'correctness') is the modern equivalent
of what has been called 'Received Pronunciation' ('RP'). It is an accent of the
south east of England which operates as a prestige norm there and (to varying
degrees) in other parts of the British Isles and beyond.
In her book Kipling's English History (1974) Marghanita
Laski refers to this accent as "gentry". "What the Producer and
I tried to do was to have each poem spoken in the dialect that was, so far as
we could tell, ringing in Kipling's ears when he wrote it. Sometimes the
dialect is most appropriately, Gentry. More often, it isn't."
Sub-varieties
Faced with the difficulty of defining RP, some researchers
have tried to distinguish between different sub-varieties:
Gimson (1980) proposed Conservative, General, and Advanced;
Conservative RP referred to a traditional accent associated with older speakers
with certain social backgrounds; General RP was considered neutral regarding
age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker; and Advanced RP referred to speech
of a younger generation of speakers. Later editions (e.g., Gimson 2008) use the
terms General, Refined and Regional.
Wells (1982) refers to "mainstream RP" and
"U-RP"; he suggests that Gimson's categories of Conservative and
Advanced RP referred to the U-RP of the old and young respectively. However,
Wells stated, "It is difficult to separate stereotype from reality"
with U-RP. Writing on his blog in February 2013, Wells wrote, "If only a
very small percentage of English people speak RP, as Trudgill et al claim, then
the percentage speaking U-RP is vanishingly small" and "If I were
redoing it today, I think I'd drop all mention of 'U-RP'".
Upton distinguishes between RP (which he equates with
Wells's "mainstream RP"), Traditional RP (after Ramsaran 1990), and
an even older version which he identifies with Cruttenden's "Refined
RP".
An article on the website of the British Library refers to
Conservative, Mainstream and Contemporary RP.
Usage
Teachers often promote the modern RP accent to non-native
speakers learning British English.[36] Non-RP Britons abroad may modify their
pronunciation to something closer to Received Pronunciation to allow better
understanding by people unfamiliar with the diversity of British accents. They
may also modify their vocabulary and grammar to approach those of Standard
English for the same reason. RP serves as the standard for English in most
books on general phonology and phonetics, and most dictionaries published in
the United Kingdom use RP in their pronunciation schemes.[citation needed]
In dictionaries
Most English dictionaries published in Britain (including
the Oxford English Dictionary) now give phonetically transcribed RP
pronunciations for all words. Pronunciation dictionaries represent a special
class of dictionary giving a wide range of possible pronunciations; British
pronunciation dictionaries are all based on RP, though not necessarily using
that name. Daniel Jones transcribed RP pronunciations of a large number of
words and names in the English Pronouncing Dictionary.Cambridge University
Press continues to publish this title, as of 2011 edited by Peter Roach, the
accent having been renamed "BBC Pronunciation". Two other
pronunciation dictionaries are in common use: the Longman Pronunciation
Dictionary, compiled by John C. Wells (using the name "Received
Pronunciation"), and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current
English, compiled by Clive Upton. This represents an accent named BR
("British English") - based on RP, but claimed to be representative
of a wider group of speakers. An earlier pronunciation dictionary by J. Windsor
Lewis gives both British and American pronunciations, using the terms General
British (GB) for the former and General American (GA) for the latter.
Status
Traditionally, Received Pronunciation was the "everyday
speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk [had] been
educated at the great public boarding-schools" and which conveyed no
information about that speaker's region of origin before 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
In the 19th century, some British prime ministers still
spoke with some regional features, such as William Ewart Gladstone. From the
1970s onwards, attitudes towards Received Pronunciation have been changing
slowly. The BBC's use of Yorkshire-born Wilfred Pickles during the Second World
War (to distinguish BBC broadcasts from German propaganda) is an earlier
example of the use of non-RP accents, but even then Pickles modified his speech
towards RP when reading the news.
Although admired in some circles, RP is disliked in others.
It is common in parts of Britain to regard it as a south-eastern English accent
rather than a non-regional one and as a symbol of the south-east's political
power in Britain. A 2007 survey found that residents of Scotland and Northern
Ireland tend to dislike RP. It is shunned by some with left-wing political
views, who may be proud of having an accent more typical of the working
classes.
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