Received Pronunciation., RP in PHONETICS

Received Pronunciation., RP in PHONETICS

The accent described here is the present-day version of the accent that has been used as the
standard in phoneticians’ description of the pronunciation of British English for centuries. The
definition of this accent is a matter of heated debate and frequent controversy: the arguments
will not be rehearsed here,
a. The number of native speakers of this accent who originate in Ireland, Scotland andWales
is very small and probably diminishing, and it is therefore a misnomer to call it an accent
of BRITISH English. It is an accent spoken by some English people.
b. The great majority of native speakers of this accent are of middle-class or upper-class
origin, educated at private schools and (if of appropriate age) university. This does not
mean that the accent cannot be acquired by others:  originally spoke with an accent with noticeable regional features,but has over many years of teaching the phonetics of English acquired an accent not far from the standard one described here.
c. The majority of speakers of this accent live in, or originate from, the south-east of England.
d. The accent is most familiar as that used by most ‘official’ BBC speakers of English origin
(newsreaders and announcers on Radio 4 and Radio 3, and most television channels).

It is also frequently heard on the BBC World Service, though that service appears to
have adopted the policy of sometimes using newsreaders and announcers with noticeable
foreign accents. It is clear that this accent will eventually lose its pre-eminent status in
broadcasting as a result of the wish to broaden the social base of broadcast speech, but it
will take a long time for this to happen.

The accent has been known for nearly a century as RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION, or by its
abbreviation, RP. Early in the 20th century, Daniel Jones, the great exponent of the description
of English pronunciation, named it PUBLIC SCHOOL PRONUNCIATION , but later
changed the name to Received Pronunciation. Other names have been proposed, such as
GENERAL BRITISH (GB) and EDUCATED SOUTHERN BRITISH ENGLISH.
but given the continuing popularity of the name Received Pronunciation, this has
been used for the description which follows.
The choice of symbols for the representation of RP is one which has provoked much
discussion, but since the 1980s there has existed, largely as a result of pressure from the major
ELT publishers, a de facto standard set of symbolization conventions which has remained
almost unchanged to the present day. It is widely accepted that some modification of these
conventions is needed to take account of observable changes in the pronunciation of English,
but it is felt to be important that such modifications should not be introduced without general
agreement among practitioners of English phonetics so that the benefits of a common system
of transcription enjoyed over the last twenty or thirty years should not be lost. An alternative
set of transcriptions has, however, been used in the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation