I have recently done some editing of the "Notable speakers" section of the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation. As you may have read in an earlier post, I added some YouTube links so that readers could listen to an example of each speaker. These were removed by an editor, who has now gently explained to me why such links are not appropriate for WP articles. I have deleted the complaints I wrote in this blog about the deletion.

The YouTube links can still be found here. I hope that they may be useful.

I would be interested to get any comments on this material. To me, it does little to support the idea that there is a single identifiable accent that could be called RP, even if you divide the speakers into different sub-groups and label their accents "Conservative RP", "Mainstream RP", "Advanced RP", "Juvenile RP", "Luvvie RP" or whatever.

[NOTE: I HAVE NOW EDITED THE WIKIPEDIA PAGES ON 'VOWEL LENGTH', 'ENGLISH PHONOLOGY' AND 'RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION' TO CORRECT THE VOWEL LENGTHENING/VOWEL SHORTENING PROBLEM DESCRIBED BELOW]

​I have noticed that an old fallacy survives in a couple of Wikipedia articles. In Vowel length and in English phonology you find the statement (made without any citation to support it) that English vowels are lengthened when followed by voiced (lenis) consonants or in an open syllable. The correct statement is that vowels are shortened when they are followed by a voiceless (fortis) consonant. You can see this in the descriptions in Cruttenden’s Gimson, section 8.4.1. The basic scientific work was published in 1970 by Matthew Chen in an interesting article entitled ‘Vowel length variation as a function of the consonant environment’ (Phonetica, 22, 129-59). I have written about this issue very briefly in ‘English Phonetics and Phonology’ (page 29 in the latest edition, in “problems and further reading”, 4.4.)  A simple “do-it-yourself” test is to measure your pronunciation of ‘ride’, ‘rye’ and ‘right’. The duration of the diphthong in ‘rye’, being in a zero-coda syllable, may be taken as the baseline duration. ‘Ride’ will show a very similar duration, but ‘right’ will have a markedly shorter duration. I will edit the two articles (and any others I find with the same error) and also remove the “generative rule” included in the Vowel length article (which is not only ad hoc and unnecessary, but also wrong).

Just a follow-up to my recent post about the unsatisfactory section headed "Prosody and intonation" in Wikipedia's article on Vowels. I've removed quite a lot of this section and rewritten the rest, but kept the title Prosody and intonation. I hope that has improved it a bit. At least it now has a couple of references.

Some time ago I grumbled that the Wikipedia article on Articulatory Phonetics had plenty of information about consonants but only a couple of sketchy notes about vowels. I've made a start on improving the situation by editing in a summary of the main articulatory variables affecting vowels, but it's pretty sketchy, like its predecessor. I hope that at least the framework is more appropriate. I have made no attempt to provide a detailed treatment of each of the variables - they are already amply covered in the huge network of overlapping phonetics articles in WP.

I've had to read the material in the corresponding WP article on Vowel as I went along. Something that has puzzled me is the statement there, in the section "Front, raised and retracted", that The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory evidence and does not clarify how articulation affects vowel quality. Vowels may instead be characterized by the three directions of movement of the tongue from its neutral position: front, raised, and retracted. There is a reference to a paper by John Esling at the end of this section, so I suppose this comes from him (I haven't been able to get hold of the article yet). I'm afraid I can't see why the traditional open/close and front/back dimensions are inapplicable, as long as one doesn't treat them as absolute determinants of vowel quality.