[b]
Received Pronunciation[/b]
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Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent of Standard English in the United Kingdom[1] and is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England",[2] although it can be heard from native speakers throughout England and Wales.[3][4] Peter Trudgill estimated in 1974 that 3% of people in Britain were RP speakers,[5] but this rough estimate has been questioned by the phonetician J. Windsor Lewis.[6]

RP enjoys high social prestige in Britain,[7] 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.[8][9] Since the 1960s, a greater permissiveness towards regional English varieties has taken hold in education.[10]

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. An individual using RP will typically speak Standard English, although the converse or inverse is not necessarily true. The standard language may be pronounced with a regional accent and the contrapositive is usually correct. It is very unlikely that someone speaking RP would use it to speak a regional dialect.

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."[11] However, the term had actually been used much earlier by Alexander Ellis in 1869[12] and P. S. Du Ponceau in 1818[13] (the term used by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927 was "received standard".[14]) 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'."[15]

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. 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.[16][17]
Alternative names

Some linguists have used the term "RP" while expressing reservations about its suitability.[18][19][20] 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.[21] Other writers have also used the name "BBC Pronunciation".[22][23] The phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis frequently criticises the name "Received Pronunciation" in his blog: he has called it "invidious",[24] a "ridiculously archaic, parochial and question-begging term"[25] and noted that American scholars find the term "quite curious".[26] 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.[27] 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".[28] Received Pronunciation has sometimes been called "Oxford English", as it used to be the accent of most members of the University of Oxford. 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.[29]

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.[30] 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.[31] 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'".[32]
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".[33]
An article on the website of the British Library refers to Conservative, Mainstream and Contemporary RP.[34]

Usage

The modern style of RP is an accent often taught to non-native speakers learning British English.[35] Non-RP Britons abroad may modify their pronunciation to something closer to Received Pronunciation to be better understood by people unfamiliar with the diversity of British accents. They may also modify their vocabulary and grammar to be closer to those of 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 published in the United Kingdom.
In dictionaries

Most English dictionaries published in Britain (including the Oxford English Dictionary) now give phonetically transcribed RP pronunciations for all words. Pronunciation dictionaries are 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.[36] This is still being published by Cambridge University Press,[37] and is now edited by Peter Roach, the accent having been renamed "BBC Pronunciation". Two other pronunciation dictionaries are in common use: the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary,[38] compiled by John C. Wells, using the name Received Pronunciation, and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English,[39] compiled by Clive Upton. This represents an accent named BR ("British English" which is based on RP, but is 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 term General British (GB) for the former and General American (GA) for the latter.[40]
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"[41] 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.[42] 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,[43] but even then Pickles modified his speech towards RP when reading the news.[44]

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.[9] A 2007 survey found that residents of Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to dislike RP.[45] It is shunned by some with left-wing political views, who may be proud of having an accent more typical of the working classes.[46] The British band Chumbawamba recorded a song entitled "R.I.P. RP", which is part of their album The Boy Bands Have Won.
Phonology
Consonants
Consonant phonemes[47] Labial Dental Alveolar Post-
alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ŋ
Stop p b t d k ɡ
Affricate tʃ dʒ
Fricative f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h
Approximant l r j w

Nasals and liquids (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /r/, /l/) may be syllabic in unstressed syllables.[48] While the IPA symbol [ɹ] is phonetically correct for the consonant in 'row', 'arrow' in many accents of American and British English, most published work on Received Pronunciation represents this phoneme as /r/.

Voiceless plosives (/p/, /t/, /k/, /tʃ/) are aspirated at the beginning of a syllable, unless a completely unstressed vowel follows. (For example, the /p/ is aspirated in "impasse", with primary stress on "-passe", but not "compass", where "-pass" has no stress.) 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.[49] /r/ is a fricative when devoiced.[48]

Syllable final /p/, /t/, /tʃ/, and /k/ may be either preceded by a glottal stop (glottal reinforcement) or, in the case of /t/, fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before a syllabic nasal (bitten [ˈbɪʔn̩]).[49][50] The glottal stop may be realised as creaky voice; thus, an alternative phonetic transcription of attempt [əˈtʰemʔt] could be [əˈtʰemm̰t].[48]

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 voicing distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds is reinforced by a number of other differences, with the result that the two of consonants can clearly be distinguished even in the presence of devoicing of voiced sounds:

Aspiration of voiceless consonants syllable-initially.
Glottal reinforcement of voiceless consonants syllable-finally.
Lengthening of vowels before voiced consonants.

As a result, some authors prefer to use the terms "fortis" and "lenis" in place of "voiceless" and "voiced". However, the latter are traditional and in more frequent usage.

The voiced dental fricative (/ð/) is more often a weak dental plosive; the sequence /nð/ is often realised as [n̪n̪] (a long dental nasal).[51][52][53] /l/ has velarised allophone ([ɫ]) in the syllable rhyme.[54] /h/ becomes voiced ([ɦ]) between voiced sounds.[55][56]
Vowels
Monophthongs of a fairly conservative variety of RP. From Roach (2004, p. 242)
Monophthongs of modern RP. From Gimson (2014, chpt. 8.9)
Ranges of the weak vowels in RP and GA. From Wells (2008, p. XXV)
Allophones of some RP monophthongs, from Collins & Mees (2003:92, 95 and 101). The red ones occur before dark /l/,[57] and the blue one occurs before velars.[58]
Monophthongs (Short) Front Central Back
Close ɪ ʊ
Mid e ə
Open æ ʌ ɒ

Examples of short vowels: /ɪ/ in kit, mirror and rabbit, /ʊ/ in foot and cook, /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.
Monophthongs (Long) Front Central Back
Close iː uː
Mid ɜː ɔː (About this sound listen)
Open ɑː

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 vowels

RP's long vowels are slightly diphthongised, especially the high vowels /iː/ and /uː/, which are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs [ɪi] and [ʊu].[59]
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