What is Received Pronunciation?

Introduction

English developed from Anglo-Saxon and is a Germanic language. However, all the invading peoples, particularly the Norman French, influenced the English language and you can find many world in English which are French in origin. Nowadays all Welsh, Scottish and Irish people speak English (even if they speak their own language as well), but all the countries have their own special accents and dialects, and their people are easily recognisable as soon as they speak. Occasionally, people from the four countries in the UK have difficulty in understanding one another because of these different accents. A southern English accent is generally accepted to be the most easily understood, and is the accent usually taught to foreighners. A southern english accent is the Queen accent. People who speak this Qween’s English are considered to be snobs.[1]

British English

British English (BrE, BE, en-GB) is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere in the Anglophone world.^[1] British English encompasses the varieties of English used within the UK, including those in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and to some extent, those spoken in the former British Empire. Some may also use the term more widely, to include other forms such as Hiberno-English (spoken in Ireland).^[2]

Most Britons – the majority of whom speak English as either a first or a second language – consider that they just speak "English", rather than "British English". The term "British English" is used only by non-British people when necessary to distinguish it from other forms of English. British people, especially the English, would normally distinguish by naming the country (e.g. "Canadian") or region (e.g. "American") of the version of English.

History

The widespread use of English worldwide is largely attributable to the power of the former British Empire, and this is reflected in the continued use of the language in both its successor (the Commonwealth of Nations) and many other countries. In the days before radio and television, most communication across the English-speaking world was by the written word. This helped to preserve a degree of global uniformity of the written language. However, due to the vast separation distances involved, variations in the spoken language began to arise. This was also aided by émigrés to the empire encountering other, non-British cultures. In some cases, resulting variations in the spoken language have led to these being reflected in minor variations in written language usage, grammar and spellings in other countries.

Accent

The most common form of English used by the British ruling class is that originating from southeast England (the area around the capital, London, and the ancient English university towns of Oxford and Cambridge). This form of the language is known as the "Received Standard", and its accent is called Received Pronunciation (RP), which is improperly regarded by many people outside the UK as "the British accent". Earlier it was held as better than other accents and referred to as the King's (or Queen's) English, or even "BBC English". Originally, this was the form of English used by radio and television. However, there is now much more tolerance of variation than there was in the past; for several decades other accents have been accepted and are frequently heard, although stereotypes about the BBC persist. English spoken with a mild Scottish accent has a reputation for being especially easy to understand. Moreover, only approximately two percent of Britons speak RP, and it has evolved quite markedly over the last 40 years.

Even in the south east there are significantly different accents; the local inner east London accent called Cockney is strikingly different from RP and can be difficult for outsiders to understand^.

There is a new form of accent called Estuary English that has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of Received Pronunciation and some of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still changing, partly influenced by Caribbean speech. Londoners speak with a mixture of these accents, depending on class, age, upbringing, and so on.

Outside the southeast there are, in England alone, other families of accents easily distinguished by natives, including: West Country (South West England), East Anglian, West Midlands, East Midlands, Liverpool (Scouse), Manchester and other east Lancashire accents, Yorkshire, Newcastle (Geordie) and other northeast England accents.

Although some of the stronger regional accents may sometimes be difficult for some English-speakers from outside Britain to understand, almost all 'British English' accents are mutually intelligible amongst the British themselves, with only occasional difficulty between very diverse accents. However, modern communications and mass media have reduced these differences significantly. In addition, most British people can to some degree temporarily 'swing' their accent (and particularly vocabulary) towards a more neutral form of 'standard' English at will, to reduce difficulty where very different accents are involved, or when speaking to foreigners. This phenomenon is known in linguistics as code shifting.

Standardisation

As with English around the world, the English language as used in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no equivalent body to the Académie française or the Real Academia Española, and the authoritative dictionaries (for example, Oxford English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Chambers Dictionary, Collins Dictionary) record usage rather than prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and neologisms are frequent.

For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the 9th century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education within Britain. Largely, modern British spelling was standardised in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), although previous writers had also played a significant role in this and much has changed since 1755. Scotland, which underwent parliamentary union with England only in 1707, still has a few independent aspects of standardisation, especially within its autonomous legal system.

The form of English taught across Europe is mainly that used in England and the subject is simply called "English".
Received Pronunciation and BBC English

What is Received Pronunciation?

"Although the BBC does not, and never did, impose pronunciations of its own on English words, the myth of BBC English dies hard. It owed its birth no doubt to the era before the Second World War, when all announcers ... spoke ... Received Pronunciation." [2]

Received Pronunciation, often abbreviated to RP, is an accent of spoken English. Unlike other UK accents, it's identified not so much with a particular region as with a particular social group, although it has connections with the accent of Southern England. RP is associated with educated speakers and formal speech. It has connotations of prestige and authority, but also of privilege and arrogance. Some people even think that the name 'Received Pronunciation' is a problem - if only some accents or pronunciations are 'received', then the implication is that others should be rejected or refused.

When writing his pronouncing dictionary in 1916, phonetician Daniel Jones described RP as the accent "most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding schools". Although this description would raise a few eyebrows today, RP is still the accent generally represented in dictionaries which give pronunciations, and it's also used as a model for the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Perhaps for this reason, RP is often thought of as an unchanging accent; a standard against which other accents can be measured or judged. Some people don't even think of it as an accent at all, but rather a way of speaking without an accent. Speaking without an accent, though, would be like painting without a colour! In fact, there is considerable variation within groups of people who are said to speak RP, the term is differently interpreted by different people, and RP itself has changed considerably over time.

What is BBC English?
RP is closely associated with broadcasting in general, and the BBC in particular. It is widely believed - even if it isn't true - that the BBC traditionally employed as newsreaders and broadcasters only people who could speak RP. If you ask people to think of a person who might speak with a traditional RP accent, they'll often think of an old-fashioned BBC announcer, addressing the nation on the Home Service.

If the phrase 'BBC English' were taken literally, it would just mean English as spoken on the BBC - which today would mean virtually every kind of English from all around the world. But this is not what it means at all.

'BBC English' is a popular term for a particular acrolect - that is, a prestigious form of speech. Other, similar terms include 'Oxford English', 'the Queen's English', 'Standard English' and, of course, RP. Haran Rasalingam, posting on the Voices site, argues that "public school dialects, educated dialects and BBC dialects are dialects of status and power which is why people feel they should try to speak more like that rather than their own native dialect."

Is there such a thing as BBC English?
The BBC doesn't require any of its broadcasters to speak with any particular accent. It could be argued that, even in those early years before the Second World War, the fact that the announcers and newsreaders heard on the BBC spoke RP was a by-product of the restricted social group from which BBC employees was drawn, rather than a matter of deliberate policy.

Nevertheless, the term 'BBC English' entered the language and is still widely used, even though - as we can see from the comments above - a range of accents are used on the BBC. The term is even being used by linguists. This maybe because, as we have seen, RP is a loaded and problematic term which conjures up many problems and prejudices. So some linguists now follow popular usage by relabelling what they used to call RP as 'BBC English' and, in some pronunciation dictionaries, the accent represented is now called 'BBC English' instead of RP.

There's a problem with this approach, though. If you call the accent normally used in BBC news broadcasts 'BBC English', and use that as an example of RP, then the people whom the BBC employs as news broadcasters are therefore RP speakers by definition. This circularity of defining 'BBC English' in relation to RP, and RP in relation to the BBC makes 'BBC English' meaningless as a concept. Ironically, this is happening just as the relationship between RP and so-called 'BBC English' might more logically be viewed as a thing of the past.

Prestige dialect

A prestige dialect is the dialect spoken by the most prestigious people in a speech community which is large enough to sustain more than one dialect.