Someone has just posted a question on the Talk page of the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation. Here it is:

The article seems to imply that RP is only used in England, or even specific to Southern England (though it discusses variant forms in Northern England), but I think accents very similar to RP are not unknown in Scotland and Wales among the upper social classes. (I do not know much about Ireland, but the 'Anglo-Irish' classes, in both North and South, in general seem to use RP.) In Scotland it is notorious that the aristocracy speak with an 'English' accent, supposedly as a result of an education in English boarding schools, but the practice seems to be somewhat more widespread, extending at least into sections of the 'upper middle' classes. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the subject could cover this?



I have come across this question, in various forms, many times and it is not easy to know how to reply. On the one hand, there is a belief that there are British people who, though born and brought up in Scotland, Wales or Ireland, are speakers of RP (as traditionally described and as spoken in the south of England). If there are such people, I think they are very rare. On the other hand, some writers have suggested that there are accents that can be called "Scottish RP", "Welsh RP" and so on - accents which display some characteristics of the regional accent implied by the name but are otherwise similar to English RP. This just seems wrong to me - an accent either is, or is not, RP.


Not that I like calling ANY accent RP!

After I objected to Alan Cruttenden’s term “London Regional General British (LRGB)” being given the same status as the term ‘Estuary English’ in the lead paragraph of the Estuary English article, the Wikipedia editor concerned agreed to move the mention of LRGB to a new section devoted to the EE name itself. Unfortunately, as Jack Windsor Lewis has recently pointed out, the new mention stated that Alan uses the terms LRGB and Estuary English interchangeably, which is clearly not the case – he refers to EE in quoting various things that have been written on the subject, but uses LRGB in what he himself has to say. I have corrected this, and hope that it now works better.

Something that bothers me about this article as a whole is that it more or less accepts EE as a genuine accent of English, ignoring the considerable body of opinion that thinks it is just a convenient catch-all label that can’t be given a precise definition. Although I know a lot of scholarly work has gone into the study of EE, I am still one of the sceptics, and have said in print “…there is no such accent, and the term should be used with care.” In the Wikipedia EE article, there is in fact a short piece (much of which was put in by me) at the end of the over-long and under-organized section called Features, which refers to some published opinions opposed to the notion of EE. However, I feel there ought to be a separate section where the arguments against treating EE as a bona fide accent are set out. I would also like the first sentence of the article to be changed from “Estuary English is an accent of English …” to “Estuary English is claimed to be …”. However, I am worried that if I make these alterations, I could be accused of pushing forward my own agenda, something which is very much disapproved of in WP. So for the present I hold back.