Lably
Skip to content

Received Pronunciation

Standard accent for British English

  • 27 min read
  • 9 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Vocabulary, Grammar and Linguistics

Lab · Class 1Comparing LengthsLab · Class 1Time – Reading the ClockLabBasic GrammarLab · Class 10–11NLP Pipelines

Linguists have long disagreed on RP's exact definition, geographic neutrality, number of speakers, nature and classification of sub-varieties, appropriateness as a standard, origins, and even its name. Furthermore, RP has changed to such a degree over the last century that many of its early 20th-century traditions of transcription and analysis have become outdated or are no longer considered evidence-based by scholars. Still, the older traditions of RP analysis continue to be commonly taught and used, for instance in language education and comparative linguistics, and RP remains a popular umbrella term in British society.

Standard Southern British English (SSBE) is a label some linguists prefer for the more recent variety that, since the late 20th century, has gradually evolved and diverged from earlier 20th-century RP or that is a newer standard accent of Southern England. While this new variant has risen in prestige, the early 20th-century variety of RP, also commonly referred to as the Queen's English or King's English, has diminished. There is no academic consensus about the terminology for these concepts; thus, some authors regard SSBE (or other terms) as entirely distinct from RP, while others use RP in a way that encompasses 21st-century SSBE. This article covers both topics.

Etymology and history

Although a form of Standard English had roughly been established in the City of London by the end of the 15th century, its accent(s) did not resemble the phonetics of Received Pronunciation until the later 19th century. RP developed during that time, emerging as a non-rhotic dialect of southeastern England, developing among the Golden Triangle of universities composed of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, as well as the prestigious fee-charging public schools that fed them, such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby.

The term (generally) received pronunciation was used by French-American linguist P. S. Du Ponceau in 1818 to discuss very generic English phonology, though the Oxford English Dictionary cites quotations even back to about 1710. In the 1860s, English phonetician Alexander John Ellis used received pronunciation to mean a general, unmarked pronunciation of British English used by educated speakers, cautioning: "There is no such thing as a uniform educated 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". By the turn of the century, the accent had become fairly uniform.

In the first edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), phonetician Daniel Jones referred to the accent as "public school pronunciation", saying "It is convenient for present purposes to choose as the standard of English pronunciation the form which appears to be most generally used by Southern English persons who have been educated at the great English public boarding schools". For the second edition in 1926 he writes: "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation, for want of a better term", establishing that name as an enduring specific label in linguistics. In 1922, the BBC formed under Sir John Reith, selecting educated and aristocratic southeastern English as its broadcasting standard, citing its being widely understood globally as the reason. In 1924, Reith explicitly promoted the BBC's educational responsibility to use this form of "correct" spoken English, which he called the "King's English". A similar term, received standard, was coined by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927.

According to the prescriptive 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'."

Alternative names

Some linguists have used the abbreviation "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 term 'The Queen's English' has also been used by some writers.

The phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis frequently criticised 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. The name "General British" is adopted in the latest revision of Gimson's Pronunciation of English. 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. 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.

Sub-varieties

Faced with the difficulty of defining a single standard of RP, some researchers have tried to distinguish between sub-varieties:

  • Gimson (1962) 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 RP. In the latest revision of Gimson's book, the terms preferred are General British (GB), Conspicuous GB and Regional GB.
  • 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.

Sign in to keep reading

8 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Language and linguistics

Simplified Chinese charactersStandardized set of Chinese charactersSicIndicates an intentional reproduction in quotationProto-Indo-European languageAncestor of the Indo-European languagesLoanwordWord borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient languageOCLCGlobal library cooperativePhilologyStudy of language in historical sources