Languages & Linguistics
Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation (RP) is a prestigious accent associated with British English, traditionally spoken by the upper class and used as a standard for teaching English pronunciation. It is characterized by non-regional pronunciation and is often associated with formality and authority. RP has been influential in shaping perceptions of "correct" English pronunciation and is commonly used in broadcasting and public speaking.
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12 Key excerpts on "Received Pronunciation"
eBook - PDF- Marnie Reed, John Levis, Marnie Reed, John M. Levis(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
British English 253 the vowel correspondences which apply between British Received Pronunciation and (a variety of) General American” (Wells 1982: xviii). This system has become something of an “industry standard” for the discussion of English vowels, and it is used in this chapter. It would be comforting to think of RP, then, as a fixed point of reference for description and teaching. However, nothing relating to the accent is entirely straightforward. At an elementary level of description, we must first recognize that RP only relates to an accent of England: it is English, not British. This is important, as the other components of the British Isles, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (described in more detail below), have, alongside their regional variations of pronunciation, variants that can to some considerable extent be considered as “standards”, and which are widely regarded as such within the British Isles. It will be apparent to listeners to national radio and television that today even news- readers, who might once have been expected formally to address their audiences in RP, are possessed of accents far removed from this, and that Welsh and Scottish accents especially are often to the fore. Of course, those accents will have been selected to be readily comprehensible to a wide international audience, but they will differ from RP to a marked degree in the regional elements that they contain. No one hearing an authoritative voice from Britain, therefore, should assume that they are hearing an RP accent. More significantly still, no one hearing an English voice should assume this either. There is today greater acceptance of the regional accents of England in broadcasting and the professions than there was formerly, rendering the identification of RP uncertain and, it must be said, of rather ques- tionable importance, for native British English speakers themselves.
- Luca Valleriani, Lukasz Bogucki(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
The label Received Pronunciation began to be not only questioned but even rejected by the major linguists and dialectologists in the 1990s and the 6 For a complete description and discussion on RP, see, among others, Gimson 1984, Ramsaran 1990, Milroy 2001, Sturiale 2002, Roach 2004, Upton 2004, Santipolo 2006, Kerswill 2007, Trudgill 2008, Cruttenden 2014, Hinton 2015, Mugglestone 2017, Fabricius 2018, Beal 2020. Classification and linguistic features of upper-class English 28 2000s, like Trudgill, Honey, the Milroys and Leith, as listed by Sturiale (2002, 95–96), because it implied the controversial concept of a standard accent. Peter Trudgill, in particular, proposed a different point of view, arguing that RP should not be considered as the standard English accent but rather as a standardised one (ibid.). Although there has been a debate on the name of the accent and on its status as a model of spoken language in Britain, the phoneticians who first described it agreed on one aspect of the definition of RP, namely the fact that it is a prestigious accent: Ellis defined it as “the educated pronunciation of the metropolis” (1869, 23, quoted in Upton 2004, 217) and Jones as the speech of “the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public boarding schools” (1917, viii, quoted in Cruttenden 2014, 76). All the major linguists of twentieth century have later confirmed that RP is undoubtedly the accent of people in power, and those who have been educated in Public Schools (among others, Crystal 1995, 365; Wells 1998, 117; Trudgill 2000, 7). Therefore, RP has often been considered the pronunciation of the social élite, who generally “do not betray their geographical origins at all when they speak,” while “people of a more middle-class background will tend to have more of a regional accent” (Trudgill 1994, 7).
eBook - ePub- Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Lynda MugglestoneChapter 8: Received Pronunciation
Lynda Mugglestone: Oxford (UK)1Defining Received Pronunciation: an overview 2Antecedents: supra-regional attitudes 3Received Pronunciation: belief and behavior 4Modern RP: the crisis of definition 5Summary 6ReferencesAbstract :This chapter explores the history and identity of ‘Received Pronunciation’ or RP, spanning the 18th century, when comment on a non-localized British accent first appears, to contemporary discussion in terms of both usage and attitudes. Charting early attempts to disseminate and foster a reference model for spoken English, and the social meanings which could also thereby be cultivated, it also uses archive material to examine particular case-histories of its adoption and use. New archive material is also used to explore its role (and explicit fostering) in institutions such as the early BBC. Changes in modern RP (and attendant crises of definition and identity) are given careful consideration in order to evaluate the question of its continued validity, either as label or linguistic reality.1Defining Received Pronunciation: an overview 1.1Controversy and consensus
Both the identity and role of Received Pronunciation (RP) have been the subject of considerable discussion. It is “an anachronism in present-day democratic society”, Abercrombie (1965: 14) declared; “old-fashioned and misleading”, Roach (2000: viii) later concurred. Intentionally displaced by other terms (“BBC Pronunciation” [Roach 2000], “non-regional pronunciation” [Collins and Mees 2003], “Reference Pronunciation” [Rosewarne 1984]), its claims as automatic reference model in dictionaries and in foreign language teaching have likewise been contested. “If we had a completely free choice of model accent it would be possible to find more suitable ones”, Roach (2000: 5) argues, advocating Scottish or Irish accents instead. Traditional images of RP nevertheless continue, foregrounding both social evaluation and supra-regionality as salient elements in its construction (“A prestige way of speaking […] the speech of educated people, not restricted to any area of England” [Kreidler 1997: 4], “the accent spoken throughout England, by the upper-middle and upper classes […] widely used in the private sector of the education subsystem” [Giegerich 1992: 43]). Other writers actively contest the viability of socially-orientated (and especially class-based) meanings. It is “impossible actually to identify the accent under discussion in social terms”, Ramsaran (1990: 178) avers, not least since “it is no longer possible to talk in […] clear-cut terms of social classes; nor is there any longer so straightforward a correlation between social background and profession or type of education in present-day society”. Elsewhere the demise of RP is predicted – or already described – in favor of another variety of speech, widely labeled “Estuary English” (see e.g. Ballard 2001: 188). This, however, attracts its own elements of controversy: it is “a putative variety of Southern British English located in the Home Counties” (Przedlacka 2000: 19); “in reality there is no such accent, and the term should be used with care” (Roach 2000: 4).
eBook - PDFA Handbook of Varieties of English
A Multimedia Reference Tool. Volume 1: Phonology. Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax
- Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W. Schneider(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Important to this chapter are transcription conventions first deployed in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and subsequently in all the larg-er native-speaker dictionaries of Oxford University Press, and, alongside North American transcriptions, in The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (Upton, Kretzschmar and Konopka 2001). These transcriptions are differ-ent in some small but significant particulars from those that might be encountered elsewhere in descriptions of Received Pronunciation, most notably as regards the TRAP, PRICE , and SQUARE vowels. They are descriptive of the reality of the kind of modern, “diluted” Received Pronunciation called for by Gimson twenty years ago. 2. RP and its lesser forms There are, of course, various kinds of Received Pronunciation. A well-known clas-sification aimed at making sense of this range is that devised by Wells (1982). There we find an upper-class accent labelled “U-RP”, and a less marked form, taken in 1982 to be the most usual and unexceptionable variety, designated “main-stream RP”. To these are added in close company “adoptive RP”, “Near-RP”, and “quasi-RP”. Simplification is sought in this chapter, with concentration on an accent that will not be the object of comment as regards elevated upbringing or social preten-sion. Furthermore, it is not to be associated with any one geographical region in England. This accent is simply labelled ‘RP’. One stage removed from this is a variety that Ramsaran (1990: 179) calls “traditional” (here trad-RP). In most re-spects RP and trad-RP are identical. But they are different in important particulars that, since they are apparent to native British English speakers, should generally be made known to the speaker-learner who wishes to avoid being judged old-fash-ioned or affected.
eBook - PDF- Bernd Kortmann, Clive Upton, Bernd Kortmann, Clive Upton(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Important to this chapter are transcription conventions first deployed in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and subsequently in all the larger native-speaker dictionaries of Oxford University Press, and, alongside North American transcriptions, in The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (Upton, Kretzschmar and Konopka 2001). These transcrip-tions are different in some small but significant particulars from those that might be encountered elsewhere in descriptions of Received Pronunciation, most notably as regards the TRAP, PRICE , and SQUARE vowels. They are de-scriptive of the reality of the kind of modern, “diluted” Received Pronunciation called for by Gimson twenty years ago. 2. RP and its lesser forms There are, of course, various kinds of Received Pronunciation. A well-known classification aimed at making sense of this range is that devised by Wells (1982). There we find an upper-class accent labelled “U-RP”, and a less marked form, taken in 1982 to be the most usual and unexceptionable variety, desig-nated “mainstream RP”. To these are added in close company “adoptive RP”, “Near-RP”, and “quasi-RP”. Simplification is sought in this chapter, with concentration on an accent that will not be the object of comment as regards elevated upbringing or social pretension. Furthermore, it is not to be associated with any one geographical region in England. This accent is simply labelled ‘RP’. One stage removed from this is a variety that Ramsaran (1990: 179) calls “traditional” (here trad-RP). In most respects RP and trad-RP are identical. But they are different in important particulars that, since they are apparent to native British English speakers, should generally be made known to the speaker-learner who wishes to avoid being judged old-fashioned or affected. To trad-RP are consigned a range of sounds that many Britons are still wont to consider what is meant
eBook - PDFListening to the Past
Audio Records of Accents of English
- Raymond Hickey(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Creaky voice quality, smoothing of diphthongs (Hannisdal 2007) and conservative features such as apical /t/ and /s/ have also been treated sporadically in the literature on RP (for present-day developments in /s/, see Levon and Holmes Elliot 2013), and could also be considered more extensively in future diachronic compari- sons in data sets constructed using online resources. 3.2 Background If there is one variety of British English which is amenable to quantita- tive exploration through the construction of a historical sociolinguistically sensitive corpus of early recordings, it is surely the British English variety we have come to know as Received Pronunciation (RP). Its dominance of the airwaves in the early days of the BBC is well documented, so that Conditioned by /l/ followed by the presence or absence of a morphological boundary, such that ruler1 (‘monarch’, bimorphemic) is phonetically distinct from ruler2 (‘instrument used to rule lines’, monomorphemic), so that the vowel of the second of the pair is more front than the vowel of the first (Christian Uffman, p.c., reported on John Wells’s phonetics blog, see http://phonetic-blog .blogspot.dk/2012/02/newly-minimal.html.) The author has recently observed marked face-monophthongization (perhaps a development in the face of goat-fronting which approaches face’s onset position and trajectory) in an adolescent female speaker aged 17 or 18, then a pupil at Marlborough College in the UK. See the segment ‘Charity garden party: super Sunday’ and the tokens today, café, cakes, day as spoken by Bella Duncan (from 01:09 to 01:29 in the recording) at this link: www.marlboroughcollege.org/news/ video-news/#!prettyPhoto (accessed 12 December 2013) Twentieth-Century RP: Prevocalic /r/ Based on the UK Office for National Statistics 2011 Census: Key Statistics for England and Wales, March 2011. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-for-local-authorities- in-england-and-wales/index.html.
eBook - ePub- Natalie Braber, Sandra Jansen, Natalie Braber, Sandra Jansen(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
© The Author(s) 2018Begin AbstractSociolinguistics in England https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_3Natalie Braber andSandra Jansen (eds.)3. Social Change, Linguistic Change and Sociolinguistic Change in Received Pronunciation
End AbstractAnne H. Fabricius1(1) Roskilde University, Roskilde, DenmarkAnne H. FabriciusIntroduction
In this chapter, I examine one sociolinguistic niche that has been somewhat downplayed in mainstream work, but as I will show below, it is one that has interesting ramifications for an understanding of the complexity of language in social life and the progression of linguistic change. The focus here is on the elite sociolect of the UK, the generational successor to Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as Standard Southern British English (SSBE). Taking a viewpoint that social class (admittedly a complex concept, as the debates in Skeggs 2015 show) continues to manifest in sociolinguistic life in the UK, I examine here a selected set of sociophonetic changes that characterise the history of the elite sociolect. It is trivially true that all language varieties change; the point of interest in this chapter is the sociolinguistic ramifications of the continued existence of elite sociolects, and whether they continue to signal and construct social difference in the community. Our claim here is that, far from being entirely levelled to other social varieties in the south of England, for example, these voices are still distinct and sociolinguistically significant.Theoretical Preliminaries
Fifty years of sociolinguistic research have shown how we can see language practice, language ideology, social fabric and social practice as intertwined, mutually constitutive semiotic processes ebbing and flowing in the course of history (Labov 1994 , 2001 ; Eckert 2008 ). Social processes such as large-scale urbanisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the upheavals of the Second World War and de-industrialisation in the late twentieth century had large impacts upon the human landscape of Britain, with waves of de-dialectalisation, dialect levelling and regionalisation as some of the sociolinguistic consequences (Trudgill 1986 ; Britain 2016 ; Coupland 2014 , 2016 ). Multi-ethnic immigration is also presently bringing about linguistic transformations of many kinds (this is especially well researched in the UK: see e.g. Cheshire et al. 2011 ; Rampton 2011 ; Kerswill 2013
eBook - PDFInternational English
A Guide to Varieties of English Around the World
- Peter Trudgill, Jean Hannah(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
(One book which attempts to help with this problem is Hughes, Trudgill and Watt, 2012.) Second, while RP is not a regional accent, it is a social accent associated particularly with the upper-middle and upper classes (and those who aspire to membership of those classes). Foreigners who are very successful at acquiring an RP accent may therefore be treated as if they were upper class, and the reaction might not always be favourable! Third, the RP accent is probably rather more difficult for many foreign -ers to acquire than, say, a Scottish accent, since RP has a large number of diphthongs and a not particularly close relationship to English orthography. Chapter 2 English, Australasian, South African and Welsh English ‘English’ types of English 15 Table 2.1 The RP vowel system* / ɪ / bid, very, mirror, wanted, horses, honest / ε / bed, merry /æ/ bad, marry / ɒ / pot, long, cough, horrid / ʌ / putt, hurry / ʊ / Put /i:/ bee /ei/ bay /ai/ buy / ɔ i/ boy /u:/ boot /ou/ boat / ɑ u/ bout / ɪə / peer, idea / εə / pair, Mary / ʊə / poor / ɔə / pore / ɔ :/ paw, port, talk, boring / ɑ :/ bard, path, dance, half, banana, father, calm / з :/ bird, furry / ə / about, sofa, butter /ai ə / fire / ɑ u ə / tower *The words in Table 2.1 are also used in the recording for WIEng, WAfEng and IndEng. 2.1.1 The RP vowel system The RP vowel system is presented in Table 2.1 and can also be heard on the recording. While RP does not have any regional variation, as we have said, it does have variation of other types. In particular, there is variation between what some writers have called ‘conservative’ and ‘advanced’ RP (see Cruttenden, 2014, and Wells, 1982). For the most part, this reflects linguistic changes that are currently taking place in RP, with ‘conservative’ pronunciations being most typical of older speakers and ‘advanced’ pronunciations typical of younger speakers.
eBook - PDFEssays on Language in Societal Transformation
A Festschrift in Honour of Segun Awonusi
- (Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cuvillier Verlag(Publisher)
British RP and the basilect-mesolect. The vowel system of an officially adopted endonormative standard – ‘Nigerian RP’ – would mainly be the same as that of British RP, but the optimality mechanism could be employed to give preference to some of the Nigerian variants for inclusion in it. Received Pronunciation (RP) in Nigeria: the continuing model It is obvious that, even in the early twenty-first century, and in spite of much earlier debate on the subject, RP remains the model which is still officially prescribed in Nigeria and which teachers and students make efforts to follow and believe they ought to follow. Of fundamental importance here is the fact that it is the model assumed by the Speech or Spoken English sections of the National Curricula in English for different levels of the school system; by course-books based on its provisions; and by other, ‘dedicated’ works serving as aids to students such as Jowitt (1996) and Awonusi (1999). Teachers and students of phonology in higher institutions encounter it in such works as O’Connor (1980), Roach (1991), and Eka (1996), and Use of English students find it in textbooks written for them such as the recent Adegbite et al. (2012). Of immense importance for the general English-using public in Nigeria is the fact that the phonetic spellings of the headwords found in the most widely used dictionaries, such as the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (OALD), are based upon it. A powerful ‘New English’ argument advanced against the continued prestige of RP is that, because English has become domesticated or nativised in Nigeria, and because in a sense ‘English has become Nigeria’s property’ (Adegbija 2004), the model for English usage in Nigeria, including pronunciation, should be evolved from within, should be ‘endonormative’ and not ‘exonormative’. The argument does not necessarily imply that an endonormative model would in its content differ from the existing exonormative model.
eBook - PDFStandards of English
Codified Varieties around the World
- Raymond Hickey(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Whilst there is good reason still to identify and describe a British English pronouncing model, though, its purpose and the means by which it is identified have now changed markedly. An evolving standard British English pronunciation model 57 There has been a sea-change in the culture surrounding a ‘standard’ accent in the century since Jones began the authoritative description of the RP model. Indeed, we might now question any expectation that standard English, by which we mean written, and to a lesser though still significant extent spoken, grammar and lexis, is to be aligned with any specific accent: it is most reasonable to assert that the standard variety can be spoken in any accent (Trudgill 1999: 118–19). Hannisdal (2006: 67–74) provides a cogent summary of the concept of the standard as it has been and might now be applied to accent. She does not shy away from applying ‘standard’ to matters of accent, but is conscious of its connection with ‘the old days of linguistic hegemony’, and writes in summary: It is problematic to talk of standard spoken English if by that we mean a set of highly codified rules of pronunciation and a fixed uniform mode of speech. Such a thing does not exist. There exists, however, a partly standardised and codified accent, namely RP, which serves as a reference accent in the phonological literature, and as a model for teaching pronun- ciation to foreigners. (Hannisdal 2006: 74) Both the purpose of a model and the accent targeted as the touchstone for the seventeenth edition of his dictionary, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Roach et al. 2006), are quite different from those originally identified by Jones.
eBook - PDFSociophonology of Received Pronunciation
Native and Non-Native Environments
- Miroslav Ježek(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Masarykova univerzita(Publisher)
As Beal (2004a: 155) observes, ‘rhoticity by this stage was 103 4.2 The Phonology of RP: Upton’s transcription model associated with both the upper classes and with “provincials”, but, crucially, the non-rhotic variety was used by those who were at this time defining Received Pronunciation’. Jones was an /r/-less speakers and his description of the accent was thus a non-rhotic one as well. This sound change can be viewed as an example of a linguistic ‘change from below’ (i.e. from below the level of conscious awareness, cf. Labov2001: 279). Within little more than a century, the notions of prestige surrounding this pho- neme completely reversed, and, ‘despite attempts to manipulate pronunciation through schooling and books of linguistic etiquette, change took place, so that r-less speech became the norm’ (Bailey 1996: 109). Structurally, the impact of the change was immense because it established four new diphthongs in what would later become known as RP: /ɪə, ɛə, ɔə, ʊə/. Interestingly, the phonemic status of the latter three has come under intense academic scrutiny and in Upton’s transcription model (2001) /ɛə/ and /ɔə/ do not appear at all, while /ʊə/, barring words whose currency is not wide, appears to be losing its status, too. linking and intrusive /r/ The two phenomena are closely linked to one another and are therefore dis- cussed together. Linking /r/ is a ‘retained historical post-vocalic word-final /r/ occurring be- fore a vowel in the following word, [it is] a normal feature of Received Pronun- ciation’ (Upton 2008: 249). In Table 1 it is given as lettER. The word poor is pronounced as [pɔ:] if followed by a consonant or a pause. However, the phrase the poor of today is realised as [ðə ˈpɔ: rəv təˈdeɪ].
eBook - PDFAttitudes to Standard British English and Standard Polish
A Study in Normative Linguistics and Comparative Sociolinguistics
- Maciej Rataj(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
standard variety, in particular among other standard dialect speakers� Thus for reasons of group identification using the standard among one’s family and friends is not desirable in certain speech communities, especially in class-based societies or those with a history of a strong class system, British society being a good case in point� Unlike in the USA or Poland, Britain’s standard accent is not only a class marker but one with a long tradition of connections to class membership and social mobility, one reinforced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prescrip- tivism (see Mugglestone 2003)� As previously mentioned, Crystal (2006: 183- 184) describes this negative attitude to RP as a sign of snobbery, while Leith (1997: 56) also describes how covert prestige discourages non-standard accent speakers from adopting RP� Mugglestone (2003: 279-280) mentions the cultural changes which took place in Britain in the 1960s to account for the new attitude to regional accents and in consequence to RP, providing the example of the poet Tony Harrison, who wrote a poem entitled Them & [uz] on how he was derided by his teacher because of his pronunciation� To proceed, it is probably to avoid
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