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  Peter Roach

"Conservative RP" again

12/5/2020

15 Comments

 
[I HAVE NOW MADE THE CHANGES SUGGESTED HERE AND ON THE WIKIPEDIA TALK PAGE, AND HOPE THEY ARE AN IMPROVEMENT]


 I last wrote in this blog on the subject of Wikipedia’s presentation of “Conservative RP” way back in 2016, when I was objecting to a poorly-written article dedicated to the subject. You can read what I wrote here. Some of the errors and unsubstantiated claims in that article were modified by an editor, and at some point a slightly reduced version was shoe-horned into the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation, and the offending article itself was deleted. You can read the current piece here.
Looking at it again I still feel that this is an unacceptable piece of work, so although I find the subject of RP rather boring, I am reluctantly starting to revise the material. The first objection I have is that the whole idea of “Conservative RP” is muddled. Its description implies that this is a present-day accent used or adopted by some British speakers (principally older and higher-class speakers), alongside other present-day accents of English; much of what is presented, however, is simply an account of the phonetics of RP of fifty to a hundred years ago. If speakers on the BBC used "Conservative RP" up to 1960, that is because they were speaking with the RP accent of sixty years ago, not because they had a distinctively conservative accent at the time. The material mixes up diachronic (historical) with synchronic (present-day) analysis; this article has a section on Historical variation, and it is there that “Conservative RP” belongs.
Section 5 of the Wikipedia piece is almost entirely based on a much-cited but superficial web article on the British Library’s “British Accents and Dialects” site. The examples given in the BL article are based on a single speaker who was born in 1909. The lead in the WP material contrasts Conservative RP with “Contemporary RP”, and claims that the Oxford English Dictionary’s pronunciations were based on Conservative RP for its first two editions, but on Contemporary RP for its third edition. No reference is given for this. We are given two alternative names for Conservative RP:  Traditional RP and Upper RP. Section 1.1 of the same WP article goes through half a dozen other names for RP, and Section 1.2 lists sub-varieties. If the terms “Traditional” and “Upper” belong anywhere, it is there (but references for their use are not given).
We are then given an unordered list of “phonological features” of Conservative RP that distinguish it from Contemporary. I have pointed out before that most of the “features” are phonetic, not phonological. The most important point to make here is that there is a great deal of overlap between this list and the list given in Section 4.3 (Historical variation), and this overlap must be confusing to readers.
Finally, Sections 1.1 and 1.2 could be better organized. What I propose to do is to move anything useful from Section 5 into Section 4.3 and then remove Section 5.
15 Comments
Ed
14/5/2020 10:45:56 am

Hello, Peter. The comments section for this post wasn't working on my laptop. I have had to post this by smart-phone. This is the first time that I've known a webpage that only worked on a smart-phone.



I have noticed that certain people on the internet are pre-occupied with conservative RP or U-RP or whatever you want to call it. When John Wells had his blog and when the website dialectblog.com was active, the comments always had a few people who just wanted to talk about it all the time.



I wonder if the fascination with it is much like the fascination with the purest dialect in an area. It's like discovering a rare specimen for the world to behold.



With RP, I've always found it very difficult to come up with a non-circular definition of what it is. Writers often seem to have in mind who they think are RP speakers and then describe how they speak, but everyone has a different idea of who is an RP speaker. In KM Petyt's famous work on West Yorkshire, he said that some RP speakers pronounce initial /gl/ as [dl] and initial /kl/ as [tl] because he had met some people whose speech was like RP in all respects except that. On this basis, virtually any pronunciation could be RP.

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Peter
14/5/2020 12:06:27 pm

Thanks for the response. Yes, it's a topic that keeps on fascinating people - when I give a talk in another country I always get asked about it. Among British people I think there's an underlying fascination (which I share) with the way older generations of speakers pronounced English.
Sorry about the trouble replying on PC, I must check that out. I have a number of issues with Weebly!

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Ed
21/5/2020 09:47:55 pm

I think that the problem with comments might be preventing other responses.

We might be the first generation that can observe linguistic change through recordings from earlier eras. One problem with looking for the most conservative speech is that you can never know when someone might conservative might come up. I mentioned this in an article for the YDS on the recordings of WWI prisoners of war in the Berlin Lautarchiv.

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Peter
22/5/2020 12:17:01 pm

Thanks for comment. I recently heard the recording made by Florence Nightingale, which was fascinating.
Looking at the comment function, I have been through all the settings and found that it had a strong spam filter. I have turned this off, and hope that makes the comment facility more usable.

peter
22/5/2020 08:32:50 am

Testing the comment function on PC (Windows 10)

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Ed
23/5/2020 05:41:41 pm

It works fine now :)

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Sidney Wood link
21/7/2020 02:20:47 pm

A belated comment on the topic if I may. Conservative RP refers to the elderly usually preserving earlier pronunciations, especially when intervening sound changes have made the speech of younger people very different. The young will become elderly one day and their speech will be considered conservative. This is a normal phonemenon that is true for all accents.Wells' U-RP is essentially the same group, perhaps with a few affectations added from Gimsonon's Advanced RP. Unlike Gimson, Wells also has Adoptive RP. Successfully adopted RP should be indistinguishable from Mainstream RP, but less successful adoption will retain features of the adopter’s original accent. Then Cruttendon has edited several new editions of Gimson's Pronunciation of English, the latest (8th, 2014) not including Gimson's RP variants but adding one of his own: Conspicuous GB (renaming RP as GB to follow Jack Windsor Lewis 1972), the “posh” speech of upper class families, exclusive boarding schools and professions traditionally associated with RP and seems therefore to be a mixture of Gimson’s Advanced and Conservative RP and Wells’ U-RP. No-one else appears to have pursued this topic of variants within RP or made it the object of any research.

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Peter
22/7/2020 07:53:38 pm

Thanks for your comments. This issue has become so complicated in my mind that I find it hard to think analytically about it. I mentioned before that I think I have two main problems, one of which might be labelled diachronic and the other synchronic. The diachronic problem relates to the use of the word "conservative". Maybe it's something to do with my politics. As you say, it is a universal finding that accents change with time, and my accent is both more modern than that described by Daniel Jones and more old-fashioned than what is described in up-to-date textbooks. The term "conservative" to me has connotations of wishing to resist change and to prefer old values and practices to modern ones, and I therefore react negatively to the claim that Jones spoke a conservative version of RP, just as I would if someone described my accent as conservative. The simple fact is that Jones's accent was older than mine, and mine is older than my grandchildren's. I therefore will not use the term "Conservative RP".
The other matter (synchronic) is the proliferation of supposed near-RP accents with their own names. Your brief note contains references to "U-RP", "Advanced RP", "Adoptive RP", "Mainstream RP" and "Conspicuous RP", as well as "Conservative RP". Elsewhere one can even find nonsenses like "Northern RP". It seems to me that if we need a standard accent we should focus on an agreed single, clearly defined one, even though everyone knows that a single standard accent is bound to be something of a fiction. To me, such accents as the "upper-class twit" pronunciation, or that of the Queen, just are not RP, though they may resemble RP. If one produced a definition of a cow, and then started including other creatures with four legs and a pair of horns in the category of "cow" you would have to start inventing names like "Deer-cow", "Goat-cow" and so on. So I will not use terms like "Advanced RP" or "Conspicuous RP".

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Ed
23/7/2020 09:45:08 pm

When I hear comments that RP used to be more required for certain professions in the past, I can help but think if this was really the case across the whole country. If this had been the case, shouldn't there be a section of the older population in each area that still speaks RP? Even in a city like Leeds, where there must have been a substantial professional class, there are hardly any elderly people who speak RP (unless they are all keeping themselves very well hidden). In general, older people tend to be further away from RP and closer to the traditional dialect.

Does this mean that there was always regional variation in the respect for RP? That might explain why dictionaries often define RP as "the educated speech of southern England". Alternatively, was the idea that RP was insisted upon in professions somewhat exaggerated?

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Sidney Wood link
26/7/2020 02:11:02 pm

Ed, regarding pressure for people with regional accents to adopt RP I like to quote the experience of William Matthews, later Professor of English in California, who described his experience from the 1930s: “Cockney, we had been taught by teachers and society, was vulgar, something to discard in favour of Standard Speech, and all of us who had professional ambitions took the warning very seriously” ("Cockney Past and Present", 1938, 1972 reprint). This was “an accent bar, a little like a colour bar” as Abercrombie put it in 1951. From Leeds we have Tony Harrison and “Them and [uz]” from 1974, reading it here: http://poetrystation.org.uk/poems/them-and-uz, expressing the same idea in a different medium. Since the 1960s there's been less pressure to adopt RP, with people retaining their regional accents. There have been reports of northerners adopting SBE rather than RP in particular.

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Ed
27/7/2020 12:19:57 pm

Thank you for the response, Sidney. I was not aware of the poem “Them and [ʊz]”. That was quite surprising for me to listen to. The use of [ʊz] was the last thing that I expected to be stigmatised. Towards the end of the poem, he mentions the rhyme of "water" with "matter" [watə]. That is an example of stigmatised traditional pronunciation and indeed that pronunciation cannot have long left to go now. It strikes me as strange to lump [watə] in the same category as [ʊz].

I had a look in Petyt (whose research was actually done in 1970-1, although the PhD wasn't published until 1977 and the book not published until 1985). If we are to insist that the consonant should be [z] rather than [s] to be within the boundaries of RP, it sounds as if there were very few people indeed in West Yorkshire who spoke RP. If we are willing to allow [ʌz] as within the boundaries of RP, there would then be a significant RP community in West Yorkshire. This is not to doubt that Tony Harrison was castigated for using [ʊz] but I'm not sure how generalisable his experiences were.

(the below is from 277 of the 1977 PhD, which is freely available at the British Library http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.468826 The research was actually on Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield rather than Leeds, but dialect studies from the time of A.J. Ellis have shown that Leeds and Bradford have hardly any difference in dialect.)

"The RP form of this pronoun is [ʌs], whereas the traditional form in
the West Riding is [ʊz], as all accounts agree.
The vowel is of course involved in the (ʌ) variable discussed earlier;
the consonant I have heard commented upon (both when I was a schoolboy, and in the opinions of my informants reported in Ch. 7 1), so I decided to examine the amounts of [s] and [z] pronunciation. In fact however the number of [s] pronunciations in my data is so small that we could probably say that this is not a variable for the great majority of speakers, [z] being virtually categorical: only 21 (s) forms were recorded (less than 5% of the total instances of this pronoun) and even some of these are probably due to a tendency in this area not investigated in this thesis, for final voiced consonants to be devoiced by assimilation to an initial voiceless consonant in the following word. Such a number is of course too small for any meaningful correlations with non-linguistic factors to show up."

Ed
27/7/2020 12:22:36 pm

Sorry, in the above, I meant to write:

If we are to insist that the consonant should be [s] rather than [z] to be within the boundaries of RP

Instead of:

If we are to insist that the consonant should be [z] rather than [s] to be within the boundaries of RP

I corrected all the IPA in the Petyt quote, copied and pasted from a PDF output of a scanner, but my brain had clearly had enough of phonetics by the time that I wrote the above!

Peter
27/7/2020 02:41:16 pm

When we lived in Leeds (1978-94) I remember noting that in our leafy suburb of Roundhay you might not hear a Yorkshire accent from one week to the next, except in shops and on buses. But we were almost all in-comers from further south. The accent "colour bar" was very noticeable in the University, at least in Arts and Humanities subjects. Academic staff spoke RP while technicians and secretaries spoke Yorkshire. Everyone was quite well aware of this, and our senior secretary could put on a good approximation of RP for the phone. Similarly, in my wider family there was always awareness of how they spoke. My sister and I were born and learned to speak in London during the war, but all our relatives were broad Lancashire and used to amuse us by putting on the dialect (using 'thee' and 'thou', pronouncing 'water' with /a/ and so on). Most of my cousins could switch to something more like RP at will (though they would sometimes get the vowels mixed up in 'butcher', 'cushion', etc.). The point I am trying to make is that most people can vary their accent when they want to.

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Ed
27/7/2020 03:12:41 pm

I see. Did you overlap with Stanley Ellis? Did he speak RP in the office? He certainly doesn't sound RP in the recordings from the SED, but he might be one of those people who could vary as you say.

You must have after Harold Orton. The recordings that I've heard of him are in RP.

I sometimes wonder how Joseph Wright himself spoke. He surely must have changed from his native dialect when he went to Oxford University, but I wonder if he went all the way to RP. There is a recording of his wife (who was 8 years younger) but not, to my knowledge, of him.

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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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