Received Pronunciation

Received Pronunciation

Received Pronunciation (RP) is a special accent of British English. Many people think of it as the standard way of speaking in England. It has been well-known around the English-speaking world since the early 1900s. People often call it the Queen’s English or the King’s English.

When we talk about RP, we are only talking about how words are pronounced. We are not talking about the words themselves, the grammar, or the style of speaking. Scholars and language experts have different ideas about what RP means, where it comes from, and whether it is a good choice for a standard accent. Because it has changed a lot over the last 100 years, some old ways of studying it are no longer used.

Some linguists now use the term Standard Southern British English (SSBE) to talk about the newer form of this accent that developed in Southern England after the mid-1900s. There isn’t full agreement on whether SSBE is completely different from RP or just another name for it in some situations.

History

In 1917, a man named Daniel Jones called this accent "Public School Pronunciation" in his book. By 1926, he changed it to "Received Pronunciation" because he couldn’t think of a better name. Other people had used similar words much earlier.

This accent became important in the late 1800s. It sounds most like the way people talk in parts of southern England, especially around London, Oxford, and Cambridge. In 1922, the BBC chose this way of speaking for their broadcasts because many people around the world could understand it.

Some people have called it other names too, like "BBC Pronunciation" or "The Queen’s English". Others prefer names like "General British" or "Standard Southern British".

Prevalence and perceptions

Received Pronunciation, often called the standard British accent, has been linked to high social class. It used to be the everyday speech of families in Southern England.

People have different ideas about how many people in Britain actually speak RP. Some experts think only about 3% do, while others guess it might be as high as 10%. RP is most common in London and the southeast of England. Even though it has been seen as the accent of powerful and wealthy people, some people dislike it. Surveys show that RP is still considered the most prestigious accent in the United Kingdom today.

Use

In the early days of British broadcasting, speakers of English often used an accent called Received Pronunciation (RP). The first director-general of the BBC wanted a special "BBC accent" so everyone could understand it. He did not like the "Oxford accent." In 1926, the BBC made a group to help with correct pronunciation, but this stopped when the Second World War began. During the war, a newsreader named Wilfred Pickles used his Yorkshire accent to help people know BBC broadcasts were not German propaganda. After the war, RP became less common in broadcasting. Today, RP is still often used by English-born announcers on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, but many other accents are also heard.

Most English dictionaries in Britain, including the Oxford English Dictionary, show RP pronunciations. Special pronunciation dictionaries, like the English Pronouncing Dictionary, are based on RP. RP has been used in teaching British English, but choosing a pronunciation model can be difficult.

Phonology

Consonants

Nasals and liquids (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /r/, /l/) may be syllabic in unstressed syllables. The consonant /r/ in RP is generally a postalveolar approximant, which would normally be expressed with the sign [ɹ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but the sign /r/ is traditionally used for RP.

Voiceless plosives (/p/, /t/, /k/, /tʃ/) are aspirated at the beginning of a syllable, unless a completely unstressed vowel follows. Aspiration does not occur when /s/ precedes in the same syllable, as in "spot" or "stop". When a sonorant /l/, /r/, /w/, or /j/ follows, this aspiration is indicated by partial devoicing of the sonorant. /r/ is a fricative when devoiced.

Syllable final /p/, /t/, /tʃ/, and /k/ may be either preceded by a glottal stop or, in the case of /t/, fully replaced by a glottal stop. The glottal stop may be realised as creaky voice.

As in other varieties of English, voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /ɡ/, /dʒ/) are partly or even fully devoiced at utterance boundaries or adjacent to voiceless consonants.

The voiced dental fricative (/ð/) is more often a weak dental plosive. /l/ has velarised allophone in the syllable rhyme. /h/ becomes voiced between voiced sounds.

Some conservative RP speakers in England may use /hw/ for ⟨wh⟩.

Vowels

Examples of short vowels: /ɪ/ in kit, /ʊ/ in foot, /e/ in dress, /ʌ/ in strut, /æ/ in trap, /ɒ/ in lot, /ə/ in ago.

Examples of long vowels: /iː/ in fleece, /uː/ in goose, /ɛː/ in bear, /ɜː/ in nurse, /ɔː/ in north, /ɑː/ in father.

The long mid front vowel /ɛː/ is transcribed with the traditional symbols ⟨ɛə, eə⟩. The predominant realisation in contemporary RP is monophthongal.

"Long" and "short" vowels

Many descriptions of the RP vowel system group the non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short". This should not be taken to mean that RP has minimal pairs in which the only difference is vowel length. "Long" and "short" are convenient cover terms for a number of phonetic features.

The vowels called "long" high vowels in RP /iː/ and /uː/ are slightly diphthongized. Vowels may be phonologically long or short but their length is influenced by their context.

In natural speech, the plosives /t/ and /d/ often have no audible release utterance-finally, and voiced consonants are partly or completely devoiced. Unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralised than stressed ones.

According to phonetician Jane Setter, the typical pronunciation of the short variant of /uː/ is a weakly rounded vowel.

Diphthongs and triphthongs

The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP. The vowel /ɔə/ had largely merged with /ɔː/ by the Second World War, and the vowel /ʊə/ has more recently merged with /ɔː/ as well among most speakers.

The diphthong /əʊ/ is pronounced by some RP speakers in a noticeably different way when it occurs before /l/, if that consonant is syllable-final.

RP also possesses the triphthongs /aɪə/ as in tire, /aʊə/ as in tower, /əʊə/ as in lower, /eɪə/ as in layer and /ɔɪə/ as in loyal.

BATH vowel

There are differing opinions as to whether /æ/ in the BATH lexical set can be considered RP. The pronunciations with /ɑː/ are invariably accepted as RP.

French words

John Wells has argued that, as educated British speakers often attempt to pronounce French names in a French way, there is a case for including /ɒ̃/ (as in bon), and /æ̃/ and /ɜ̃ː/ (as in vingt-et-un), as marginal members of the RP vowel system.

Alternative notations

Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription. Clive Upton devised a modified system for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) based on contemporary pronunciation.

Geoff Lindsey has proposed a new system as a replacement.

Historical variation

Like all accents, RP has changed over time. For example, old recordings show that words like land used to sound a bit like lend. Even Queen Elizabeth II changed her pronunciation during her time as queen.

The way people spoke on the BBC in the 1950s sounds very different from today. These older voices are often used for funny effects in shows that make fun of old-fashioned ways of talking, like the Harry Enfield Show.

Vowels

• Words such as cloth, gone, off, often, cross used to sound different, but now they all sound more alike.
• The way we say words like horse and hoarse has changed too.
• Words like tour and moor used to sound different but now they often sound the same.
• The sounds in words like cup and happy have shifted over time.
• The way we say words like fair and near has also changed.

Consonants

• The old way of saying words beginning with “wh”, like which, is mostly gone now.
• There are new ways of pronouncing words with certain sounds, like in neutral or reckless.
• The sound “r” used to be pronounced differently, but now it’s simpler.
• Today, people usually say words like tube and dew in a more straightforward way.

Word-specific changes

Some individual words have changed how they’re said over time:

• The word Mass used to sound different but now it’s said in a simpler way.
• The way we use “an” before words that start with “h”, like in an hyaena, is now rare.

Comparison with other varieties of English

See also: Sound correspondences between English accents

RP, like most English accents outside Northern England, has a different way to say pairs of words such as "put" and "putt". In RP, the "r" sound is only used when it is followed by a vowel sound. For example, words like "father" and "farther" sound the same in RP.

RP keeps words like "Mary", "marry", and "merry" sounding different, unlike in many North American accents. It does not mix up words like "father" and "bother" or "cot" and "caught". RP usually adds a "y" sound after some letters, as in "new" or "tune", which is different from other English accents. The "t" and "d" sounds in RP are usually not softened as they are in some other accents. RP also mixes the "w" and "wh" sounds together, although some training can keep them separate. RP does not drop the "h" sound from words like "head" or "horse". Unlike many other English accents, RP keeps words like "Lenin" and "Lennon" sounding different.

Spoken specimen

The audio recording shows someone speaking with a special type of British English called Received Pronunciation.

The Journal of the International Phonetic Association often uses a story called the North Wind and the Sun to show how different accents sound. This recording was made by a woman born in 1953 who studied at Oxford University. There are three ways to write down how the words sound:

Phonemic

Allophonic

Orthographic

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveller came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveller take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveller fold his cloak around him, and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shone out warmly, and immediately the traveller took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

Notable speakers

Some famous people are known for speaking with an RP accent. This includes members of the British royal family and well-known actors, writers, and public figures like Julie Andrews, David Attenborough, Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Emma Watson, and many others. These people are recognized for using this special way of speaking English.

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