Received Pronunciation


Received Pronunciation is the accent of British English regarded as the standard one, carrying the highest social prestige, since as late as the beginning of the 20th century. It is also commonly referred to as the Queen's English or King's English. The study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of standard British English, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered.
Language scholars have long disagreed on RP's exact definition, how geographically neutral it is, how many speakers there are, the nature and classification of its sub-varieties, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, how the accent has changed over time, 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a degree over the last century that many of its early 20th-century traditions of transcription and analysis have become outdated or are no longer considered evidence-based by linguists. Standard Southern British English is a label some linguists use for the variety that gradually evolved from RP in the late 20th century and replaced it as the commonplace standard variety of Southern England, while others now simply use SSBE and RP as synonyms. 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.

History

In the first edition of the British phonetician Daniel Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary, he named the accent "Public School Pronunciation"; for the second edition in 1926 he wrote: "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation, for want of a better term". However, the term had been used much earlier by P. S. Du Ponceau in 1818 and the Oxford English Dictionary cites quotations back to about 1710. A similar term, received standard, was coined by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927. The early phonetician Alexander John Ellis used both terms interchangeably, but with a much broader definition than Jones's, saying, "There is no such thing as a uniform educated pron. of English, and. and is a variable quantity differing from individual to individual, although all its varieties are 'received', understood and mainly unnoticed".
Although a form of Standard English had been established in the City of London by the end of the 15th century, it did not begin to resemble RP until the late 19th century. RP has most in common with the dialects of what has been termed the South East Midlands, in particular the Golden Triangle of universities, namely London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the public schools that fed them, such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby. In 1922, the BBC selected RP as its broadcasting standard, citing its being widely understood globally as a reason.
According to Fowler's Modern English Usage, "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 term "RP" while expressing reservations about its suitability. The Cambridge-published English Pronouncing Dictionary 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" 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:

Sub-varieties

Faced with the difficulty of defining a single standard of RP, some researchers have tried to distinguish between sub-varieties:
  • 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 use the terms General, Refined and Regional RP. In the latest revision of Gimson's book, the terms preferred are General British, Conspicuous GB and Regional GB.
  • 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, Traditional RP, 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.

    Prevalence and perceptions

Traditionally, Received Pronunciation has been associated with high social class. It was the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk been educated at the great public boarding-schools" and which conveyed no information about that speaker's region of origin before attending the school. An 1891 teacher's handbook stated, "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". Nevertheless, in the 19th century some British prime ministers, such as William Ewart Gladstone, still spoke with some regional features.
Opinions differ over the proportion of Britons who speak RP. Trudgill estimated 3% in 1974, but that rough estimate has been questioned by J. Windsor Lewis. Upton notes higher estimates of 5% and 10% but refers to these as "guesstimates" not based on robust research.
The claim that RP is non-regional is disputed, since it is most commonly found in London and the southeast of England. It is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the South of England", and alternative names such as "Standard Southern British" have been used.
Despite RP's historic high social prestige in Britain, being seen as the accent of those with power, money, and influence, it may be perceived negatively by some as being associated with undeserved, or accidental, privilege and as a symbol of the southeast's political power in Britain. Based on a 1997 survey, Jane Stuart-Smith wrote, "RP has little status in Glasgow, and is regarded with hostility in some quarters". A 2007 survey found that residents of Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to dislike RP. It is shunned by some with left-wing political views, who may be proud of having accents more typical of the working classes.
Since the Second World War, and increasingly since the 1960s, a wider acceptance of regional English varieties has taken hold in education and public life. Nonetheless, surveys from 1969 to 2022 consistently show that RP is perceived as the most prestigious accent of English in the United Kingdom. In 2022, 25% of British adults reported being mocked for their regional accent at work, and 46% in social situations.

Use

Media

In the early days of British broadcasting, speakers of English origin almost universally used RP. The first director-general of the BBC, Lord Reith, encouraged the use of a 'BBC accent' because it was a "style or quality of English which would not be laughed at in any part of the country". He distinguished the BBC accent from the 'Oxford accent', to which he was "vehemently opposed". In 1926 the BBC established an Advisory Committee on Spoken English with distinguished experts, including Daniel Jones, to advise on the correct pronunciation and other aspects of broadcast language. The Committee proved unsuccessful and was dissolved on the outbreak of the Second World War.
While the BBC did advise its speakers on pronunciation, there was never a formalised official BBC pronunciation standard. A notable departure from the use of RP came with the Yorkshire-born newsreader Wilfred Pickles during the Second World War; his accent allowing listeners to more clearly distinguish BBC broadcasts from German propaganda, though Pickles had modified his accent to be closer to RP. Since the Second World War RP has played a much smaller role in broadcast speech. RP remains the accent most often heard in the speech of announcers and newsreaders on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and in some TV channels, but non-RP accents are now more widely encountered.

Dictionaries

Most English dictionaries published in Britain now give phonetically transcribed RP pronunciations for all words. Pronunciation dictionaries represent 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 words and names in the English Pronouncing Dictionary. Cambridge University Press continues to publish this title, as of 1997 edited by Peter Roach. Two other pronunciation dictionaries are in common use: the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, compiled by John C. Wells, and Clive Upton's Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English,.

Language teaching

Pronunciation forms an essential component of language learning and teaching; a model accent is necessary for learners to aim at, and to act as a basis for description in textbooks and classroom materials. RP has been the traditional choice for teachers and learners of British English. However, the choice of pronunciation model is difficult, and the adoption of RP is in many ways problematic.

Phonology

Consonants

Nasals and liquids may be syllabic in unstressed syllables. The consonant in RP is generally a postalveolar approximant, which would normally be expressed with the sign in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but the sign is nonetheless traditionally used for RP in most of the literature on the topic.
Voiceless plosives are aspirated at the beginning of a syllable, unless a completely unstressed vowel follows. Aspiration does not occur when precedes in the same syllable, as in "spot" or "stop". When a sonorant,,, or follows, this aspiration is indicated by partial devoicing of the sonorant. is a fricative when devoiced.
Syllable final,,, and may be either preceded by a glottal stop or, in the case of, fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before a syllabic nasal. The glottal stop may be realised as creaky voice; thus, an alternative phonetic transcription of attempt could be.
As in other varieties of English, voiced plosives 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 /p, t, k, tʃ/ syllable-finally
  • Shortening of vowels before voiceless consonants
As a result, some authors prefer to use the terms [fortis and lenis|fortis and lenis] in place of voiceless and voiced. However, the latter are traditional and in more frequent usage.
The voiced dental fricative is more often a weak dental plosive; the sequence is often realised as . has velarised allophone in the syllable rhyme. becomes voiced between voiced sounds.

Vowels

Examples of short vowels: in kit, mirror and rabbit, in foot and cook, in dress and merry, in strut and curry, in trap and marry, in lot and orange, in ago and sofa.
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

Examples of long vowels: in fleece, in goose, in bear, in nurse and furry, in north, force and thought, in father and start.
The long mid front vowel is elsewhere transcribed with the traditional symbols. The predominant realisation in contemporary RP is monophthongal.

"Long" and "short" vowels

Many conventional 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 long-short pairings shown above include also differences in vowel quality.
The vowels called "long" high vowels in RP and are slightly diphthongized, and are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs and. The starting point of the diphthongal can be either close to or a more centralised and even unrounded, and its narrow transcriptions could be either or.
Vowels may be phonologically long or short but their length is influenced by their context: in particular, they are shortened if a voiceless consonant follows in the syllable, so that, for example, the vowel in bat is shorter than the vowel in bad. The process is known as pre-fortis clipping. Thus phonologically short vowels in one context can be phonetically longer than phonologically long vowels in another context. For example, the vowel called "long" in reach may be shorter than the vowel called "short" in the word ridge . Wiik, cited in, published durations of English vowels with a mean value of 172 ms for short vowels before voiced consonants but a mean value of 165 ms for long vowels preceding voiceless consonants.
In natural speech, the plosives and often have no audible release utterance-finally, and voiced consonants are partly or completely devoiced ; thus the perceptual distinction between pairs of words such as bad and bat, or seed and seat rests mostly on vowel length.
Unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralised than stressed ones. In unstressed syllables occurring before vowels and in final position, contrasts between long and short high vowels are neutralised and short and occur. The neutralisation is common throughout many English dialects, though the phonetic realisation of e.g. rather than is not as universal.
According to phonetician Jane Setter, the typical pronunciation of the short variant of is a weakly rounded near-close near-back rounded vowel.

Diphthongs and triphthongs

The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP. The vowel had largely merged with by the Second World War, and the vowel has more recently merged with as well among most speakers, although the sound is still found in conservative speakers, and in less common words such as boor. See – merger. More recently has become a pure long vowel, as explained above. is increasingly pronounced as a monophthong, although without merging with any existing vowels.
The diphthong is pronounced by some RP speakers in a noticeably different way when it occurs before, if that consonant is syllable-final and not followed by a vowel. The realisation of in this case begins with a more back, rounded and sometimes more open vowel quality; it may be transcribed as or. It is likely that the backness of the diphthong onset is the result of allophonic variation caused by the raising of the back of the tongue for the. If the speaker has "l-vocalization" the is realised as a back rounded vowel, which again is likely to cause backing and rounding in a preceding vowel as coarticulation effects. This phenomenon has been discussed in several blogs by John C. Wells. In the recording included in this article the phrase "fold his cloak" contains examples of the diphthong in the two different contexts. The onset of the pre- diphthong in "fold" is slightly more back and rounded than that in "cloak".
RP also possesses the triphthongs as in tire, as in tower, as in lower, as in layer and as in loyal. There are different possible realisations of these items: in slow, careful speech they may be pronounced as two syllables with three distinct vowel qualities in succession, or as a monosyllabic triphthong. In more casual speech the middle vowel may be considerably reduced, by a process known as smoothing, and in an extreme form of this process the triphthong may even be reduced to a single long vowel. In such a case the difference between,, and in tower, tire, and tar may be neutralised with all three units realised as or. This type of smoothing is known as the tower–''tire, tower–tar and tire–tar'' mergers.
As two syllablesTriphthongLoss of mid-elementFurther simplified asExample
tire
tower
lower
layer
loyal

BATH vowel

There are differing opinions as to whether in the BATH lexical set can be considered RP. The pronunciations with are invariably accepted as RP. The English Pronouncing Dictionary does not admit in BATH words and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists them with a § marker of non-RP status. John Wells, who grew up in the north of England and uses in "bath" and "glass", considers this the only acceptable phoneme in RP. Others have argued that is too categorical in the north of England to be excluded. Clive Upton believes that in these words must be considered within RP and has called the opposing view "south-centric". Upton's Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English gives both variants for BATH words. A. F. Gupta's survey of mostly middle-class students found that was used by almost everyone who was from clearly north of the isogloss for BATH words. She wrote, "There is no justification for the claims by Wells and Mugglestone that this is a sociolinguistic variable in the north, though it is a sociolinguistic variable on the areas on the border ". In a study of speech in West Yorkshire, K. M. Petyt wrote that "the amount of usage is too low to correlate meaningfully with the usual factors", having found only two speakers who consistently used.
Jack Windsor Lewis has noted that the Oxford Dictionary's position has changed several times on whether to include short within its prescribed pronunciation. The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names uses only, but its author, Graham Pointon, has stated on his blog that he finds both variants to be acceptable in place names.
Some research has concluded that many people in the North of England have a dislike of the vowel in BATH words. A. F. Gupta wrote, "Many of the northerners were noticeably hostile to, describing it as 'comical', 'snobbish', 'pompous' or even 'for morons'." K. M. Petyt wrote that several respondents "positively said that they did not prefer the long-vowel form or that they really detested it or even that it was incorrect". Mark Newbrook has assigned this phenomenon the name "conscious rejection", and has cited the vowel as "the main instance of conscious rejection of RP" in his research in West Wirral.

French words

has argued that, as educated British speakers often attempt to pronounce French names in a French way, there is a case for including , and and , as marginal members of the RP vowel system. He also argues against including other French vowels on the grounds that not many British speakers succeed in distinguishing the vowels in bon and banc, or in rue and roue. However, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary draws a distinction between and the unrounded of banc for a total of four nasal vowels.

Alternative notations

Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription. Clive Upton devised a modified system for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary based on contemporary pronunciation. His changes to five symbols from the traditional Gimson system are now used in many other Oxford University Press dictionaries; the differences are shown in the table below.
Lexical set Traditional symbolUpton's reform symbol

Geoff Lindsey, arguing that the system of transcription once used for RP has become outdated and in consequence has proposed a new system as a replacement. Lindsey's system is as follows—differences between it and standard transcription are depicted with the traditional transcription in parentheses.

Historical variation

Like all accents, RP has changed with time. For example, sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was usual for speakers of RP to pronounce the sound, as in land, with a vowel close to, so that land would sound similar to a present-day pronunciation of lend. RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English, but recordings show that even Queen Elizabeth II shifted her pronunciation over the course of her reign, ceasing to use an -like vowel in words like land. The change in RP may be observed in the home of "BBC English". The BBC accent of the 1950s is distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is used for comic effect in programmes wishing to satirise 1950s social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr. Cholmondley-Warner" sketches.
Image:RP vowel movement.png|thumb|upright=1.59|A comparison of the formant values of for older and younger RP speakers. From
A few illustrative examples of changes in RP during the 20th century and early 21st are given below. A more comprehensive list is given in Gimson's Pronunciation of English.

Vowels

  • Words such as, gone, off, often, cross were formerly pronounced with instead of, so that often and orphan were homophones. The Queen continued to use the older pronunciations, but it is now rare to hear this on the BBC.
  • There used to be a distinction between horse and hoarse with an extra diphthong appearing in words like hoarse,, and pour. The symbols used by Wright are slightly different: the sound in fall, law, saw is transcribed as and that in more, soar, etc. as. Daniel Jones gives an account of the /ɔə/ diphthong, but notes "many speakers of Received English, myself among them, do not use the diphthong at all, but replace it always by /ɔː/". This distinction had become obsolete in RP by the late 20th century.
  • The vowel in words such as tour, moor, sure used to be, but this has merged with for most contemporary speakers. The effect of these two mergers is to bring about a number of three-way mergers of items which were hitherto distinct, such as poor, paw and pore all becoming.
  • The vowel and the starting point of the diphthong has become lowered from mid to open-mid.
  • The starting point of the diphthong has raised from to.
  • Before the Second World War, the vowel of cup was a back vowel close to cardinal. It then shifted forward to, but is increasingly used in modern RP to avoid the clash with the lowered variety of in the region.
  • There has been a change in the pronunciation of the unstressed final vowel of happy as a result of a process known as Phonological [history of English close front vowels#Happy-tensing|happY-tensing]: an older pronunciation of happy would have had the vowel /ɪ/ whereas a more modern pronunciation has a vowel nearer to /iː/. In pronunciation handbooks and dictionaries it is now common to use the symbol /i/ to cover both possibilities.
  • In a number of words where contemporary RP has an unstressed syllable with schwa, older pronunciations had, for instance, the final vowel in the following: kindness, doubtless, witness, witless, toilet, fortunate.
  • The phoneme was realised as a centring diphthong in the past, whereas most present-day speakers of RP pronounce it as a long monophthong.
  • The and phonemes are also becoming monophthongised to and, though this is not yet as widespread as for.
  • A change in the symbolisation of the GOAT diphthong reflects a change in the pronunciation of the starting point: older accounts of this diphthong describe it as starting with , moving towards . This was often symbolised as /ou/ or /oʊ/. In modern RP the starting point is unrounded and central, and is symbolised /əʊ/.
  • The vowels in and, traditionally transcribed as and, have shifted upwards, and are now close to and , respectively, in quality.
  • The vowels in and, traditionally transcribed as and, have undergone fronting and reduction in the amount of lip-rounding.
  • As noted above, the vowel has become more open, near to cardinal.

    Consonants

  • For speakers of Received Pronunciation in the late 19th century, it was common for the consonant combination to be realised as a voiceless labio-velar fricative , as can still be heard in the 21st century in the speech of many speakers in Ireland, Scotland and parts of the US. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, the phoneme has ceased to be a feature of RP, except in an exaggeratedly precise style of speaking.
  • There has been considerable growth in glottalisation in RP, most commonly in the form of glottal reinforcement. This has been noted by writers on RP since quite early in the 20th century. Ward notes pronunciations such as for neutral and for reckless. Glottalization of /tʃ/ is widespread in present-day RP when at the end of a stressed syllable, as in butcher .
  • The realisation of /r/ as a tap or flap has largely disappeared from RP, though it can be heard in films and broadcasts from the first half of the 20th century. The word very was frequently pronounced . The same sound, however, is sometimes pronounced as an allophone of /t/ when it occurs intervocalically after a stressed syllable – the "flapped /t/" that is familiar in American English. Phonetically, this sounds more like /d/, and this pronunciation is sometimes known as /t/-voicing.
  • Most RP speakers use /tʃ/ instead of /tj/ and /dʒ/ instead of /dj/ in accented syllables.

    Word-specific changes

A number of cases can be identified where changes in the pronunciation of individual words, or small groups of words, have taken place.
  • The word Mass was often pronounced /mɑːs/ in older versions of RP, but the word is now almost always /mæs/.
  • The indefinite article an was traditionally used before a sounded /h/ if immediately followed by an unstressed vowel, as in 'an hyaena.' This is now uncommon, especially in speech, and may be confined only to some of the more frequently used words, such as 'horrific' and 'historical.'

    Comparison with other varieties of English

  • Like most other varieties of English outside Northern England, RP has undergone the foot–''strut split: pairs like put/putt are pronounced differently.
  • RP is a non-rhotic accent, so does not occur unless followed immediately by a vowel. Pairs such as father/farther, caught/court and formally/formerly are homophones.
  • Unlike a number of North American English accents, RP has not undergone the Mary–marry–merry, nearer–mirror, or hurry–furry mergers: all these words are distinct from each other.
  • Unlike many North American accents, RP has not undergone the father–bother or cot–caught mergers.
  • RP does not have yod-dropping after,,, and, but some speakers of RP have yod-dropping after and. Hence, for example, new, tune, dune, resume and enthusiasm are pronounced,,, and rather than,,, and. This contrasts with many East Anglian and East Midland varieties of English language in England and with many forms of American English, including General American. In words such as pursuit and allure, both pronunciations may be heard in RP, but major dictionaries only list the pronunciation with for pursuit. There are, however, several words where a yod has been lost with the passage of time: for example, the word suit originally had a yod in RP but this is now extremely rare.
  • The flapped variant of and is not used very often.
  • RP has undergone the wine–whine merger. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, based in London, still teaches these two sounds for international breadth as distinct phonemes. They are also distinct from one another in most of Scotland and Ireland, in the northeast of England, and in the southeastern United States.
  • Unlike some other varieties of English language in England, there is no h''-dropping in words like head or horse. In hurried phrases such as "as hard as he could" h-dropping commonly applies to the word he.
  • Unlike most Southern Hemisphere English and North American English accents, RP has not undergone the weak vowel merger, meaning that pairs such as Lenin/''Lennon'' are distinct.
  • In traditional RP is an allophone of .

    Spoken specimen

The Journal of the International Phonetic Association regularly publishes "Illustrations of the IPA" which present an outline of the phonetics of a particular language or accent. It is usual to base the description on a recording of the traditional story of the North Wind and the Sun. There is an IPA illustration of British English.
The female speaker is described as having been born in 1953 and educated at Oxford University. To accompany the recording there are three transcriptions: orthographic, phonemic and allophonic.

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

The following people have been described as RP speakers: