Notable speakers of RP: revised post

4/27/2018

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.

25 Comments

4/27/2018 06:02:55 pm

I was the one who put together the short list based on Wells's various statements. I did this so long ago that it is off the Wikipedia history page now. My rationale was simply that Wells was a recognised expert in RP and his statements would count as a reliable source on Wikipedia.

You are definitely right that videos of the speakers are more useful for learners of English, and I'm sure that many people will find this an improvement. I expect that most learners of English will find the differences amongst these speakers hard to detect, even if natives can hear them.

Peter

4/27/2018 06:36:27 pm

Thanks for the comment. The list has grown much more disparate now, of course. The lack of female speakers did need to be remedied. I shouldn't have gone sounding off about my dislike of the RP concept, though - I fear I am getting boring on the subject.

4/28/2018 05:32:34 pm

In his work on Bolton, Graham Shorrocks wrote that everyone has their own language and a dialect is a collection of similiar idiolects (pages 50-51). For teaching a foreign language, it is beneficial to reduce the complexity to a simple model. Going back in time, Daniel Jones said that he was describing his own idiolect. The number of people who spoke exactly the same way as him must have been small.

It is good to have some female speakers on as well.

This has been a problem with other Wikipedia articles too. There has sometimes been debates over who to count as a true Cockney speaker on the article for Cockney. There is some expert reference from Peter Wright, but his examples are very dated now. The Yorkshire article is on solid ground in South Yorkshire with the Loach films "Kes" and "The Price of Coal", but there have sometimes been complaints about the lack of examples from North Yorkshire. The only famous person with a North Yorkshire accent who I can think of is Alan Hinkes, and even he is not that famous! Many of the other dialect articles don't have any examples at all.

Sidney Wood link

4/30/2018 06:26:28 pm

You've said before you don't believe there's an accent called RP. Should we take that at face value, or are you really saying something else? What were Jones, Gimson and Wells describing? What were you describing in an example of RP for the JIPA? What was everyone else obliged to adopt before around 1970 in order to get work in some spheres? I'm guessing that few people adopt RP today, apart from actors for the stage. The King's English was a book published more than 100 years ago with prescriptive advice more suited to the 19th than the 21st c. But the title became a byword for undefined "good English". But nothing to do with RP. Lord Reith wanted RP for some appointments at the BBC but that's changed now. Broadcast English is not the same as RP. There may have been a time when RP speakers formed a majority at Oxford or Cambridge, maybe not, but surely not today? RP is defined by it's phonology, especially MOUTH, GOAT, LOT, THOUGHT, CHOICE. These vowels differentiate RP from regional Home Counties SBE, aka Estuary English, which is otherwise close (although all those letters to the press in the 1980s show that their RP-speaking writers were still aware of the shibboleth, perhaps not today). The problem for finding examples of true RP is that there aren't many of them, they have to have recordings available in public, or are prepared to do one. If you want a recent version of RP Leading politicians seem to have regional accents nowadays. I have examples of aristocrats who don't speak RP (inherited titles, not life peers). Theatre RP is probably mostly adopted RP today and actors may well offer several accents appropriate for different situations (perhaps convincing everyone except the truly local population as Ed hinted above). Michelled Dockery did Downton Abbey with her adopted stage RP, but she's made other films with her native Home Counties SBE. RP still exists, if you know where to find it. Or like me, wait till it turns up.

Peter

5/1/2018 08:51:25 am

Thanks for the comment. I can see that I have been sending out confusing messages, partly because of the scrappy nature of the blog format. A proper answer to the points you raise will take more space than this reply box, but I will try soon. I think the most important point is that while it's possible to define an accent called RP (as Jones did), nowadays the term is used so loosely that (it seems to me) there are many accents all given the title, leading to sub-varieties of RP such as "Advanced RP" and "Conservative RP". There was even a suggestion at one time of a "Northern RP"! I agree that the underlying phonological system of RP is pretty well fixed. It's the phonetic variation that's the problem for me.

Sidney Wood link

5/1/2018 02:12:42 pm

I think the problem is that there are so few RP speakers now that people hardly get to hear them, so we're losing the sense of pronunciation and RP phonology. I've noted several research papers where RP and regional Home Counties SBE were not distinguished, with confusing results. The general public has always had a vague conception of accents - Queen's English, Public School English, Oxford English, RP, BBC English, Officer English, who cares what's what so long as you keep your head down. But linguists at least should be aware of the differences, it's our bread and butter after all. This is particularly important now that more and more regional accents are being studied. This is also relevant for the continued use of RP as a model for British English pronunciation, especially when it seems that fewer and fewer students can tell the difference. Phonetics students are supposed to be able to hear the difference between RP [ɒ] and regional [ɔ] for LOT, RP [əʊ] and regional [aʊ] for GOAT etc. If they can't, how can they be expected to maintain RP as a model?

I read recently that many speakers of Northern British English are adopting SBE, not under pressure but spontaneously, hoping it might improve their careers. And what they're adopting is not RP but Home Counties SBE, the accent that's heard everywhere today.

RP might disappear with time, or it might survive in it's own corner. I suppose the crunch will come as more and more students at the public schools continue to speak regional English rather than RP. There are reports that that is already happening.

Edward Aveyard link

5/1/2018 09:16:00 pm

Hello, Sidney. From your response, are you saying that you wouldn't classify any of those speakers on the RP list as being RP speakers?

If you are sufficiently familiar with the dialects, do you think that the lists on the articles for Cockney and Yorkshire are reasonable?

I've noticed that descriptions of RP do not normally go into methodology much. In contrasts, dialectologists and sociolingists often have debates about the best methodology.

Sidney Wood link

5/1/2018 11:18:59 pm

I'll work through them. I'm uneasy about labelling named living people, I'd usually rather say "actor born in 1940s" or "broadcaster born in 1950s". An off the cuff judgment isn't worth much, you need to collect instances of vowels carefully. My Cockney doesn't go beyond William Matthews (1938), Eva Sivertsen (1960) and Wells (1982). I've kept Multicultural London at arm's length, life's too short to get in deep. For Yorkshire you have the SED recordings of people born around 1870, and the BBC recordings from around 2000 (British Library).

5/2/2018 09:15:25 pm

Hello, Sidney. I had a look on your website. On one page, you give a few examples of RP over the years: William Somerset Maugham, Harold MacMillan, Ian Fleming, Kingsley Amis, William Hague. We could perhaps add Hague to the Wikipedia list with your site as the reliable source.

The SED recordings that you mention are wonderful. These were the product of a dialect census that was planned for years in advance. Describing RP accurately would probably require the same obsessive passion that Harold Orton had for dialects. Fortunately, such accuracy is not necessary for using RP as a rough model in teaching English to non-natives.

Sidney Wood link

5/4/2018 10:31:13 am

Ed, William Hague would certainly do as an example of RP. I suspect it's adopted RP, he sometimes slips up over the TRAP-BATH split. Youtube has (or had) a youthful imitation of Churchill.

Peter

5/4/2018 11:14:20 am

Sorry, but I really have to disagree about William Hague. He not only has recognizable Yorkshire characteristics in his speech, but is openly proud of the fact (as, of course, he should be). Classing him as an RP speaker would surely widen the boundaries even further.

Sidney Wood link

5/5/2018 12:11:22 pm

This is an example of adopted RP that falls short, the possible fate of so many. When adopted RP is 100% successful it should be impossible to detect (but see Wells 1982). As far as I know there's no criterion for rejecting an adopted RP as unsuccessful, except perhaps personal disappointment or not being accepted for an intended career. I cited occasional misses over the trap-bath split, you probably have other examples. But that's what adopted RP is about. He is nevertheless targeting the RP vowel system in the recordings I've heard.

5/5/2018 01:14:41 pm

I found the footage of Hague when he was 16. He did seem to be trying hard to sound RP in that speech. His speeches as an adult don't seem to have tried as hard. Using /a/ in BATH is considered part of RP by Upton. Hague also uses a schwa at the end of words such as "horses", "started", etc. which is usually marked as non-RP although it doesn't seem to be subject to any stigma.

I am not an RP speaker. For what it is worth, I would have definitely considered Tony Benn as an RP speaker. I would also count Ken Clarke, although he seems to have become a bit less posh with age.

Sidney Wood link

5/5/2018 06:10:32 pm

Ed, is that Ken Clarke the MP, now Father of the House? First impressions after listening to interviews and debates on Youtube is that his MOUTH and GOAT are not RP. I couldn't find any early recordings. I've heard Tony Benn prided himself on his Estuary English, which is Home Counties SBE. Once again, it seems that northerners are targeting Home Counties SBE rather than RP. The last Tory PM who spoke RP was probably Mrs Thatcher, successful adopted RP. The first Tory PM who didn't speak RP was probably Edward Heath, a native regional EE speaker from Thanet in Kent.

I'm not an RP speaker either. I daren't try, the result would be a disastrous caricature.

Sidney Wood link

5/5/2018 02:30:20 pm

Peter, what you should do perhaps is define what you're looking for. It's easy to exclude unsuccessfully adopted RP, for example when regionalisms show through. This leaves you with original RP, and successfully adopted RP that can't be distinguished from original RP. Home counties SBE and London SBE are so often confused with RP these days and need to be distinguished - MOUTH, GOAT, LOT and THOUGHT are sufficient to differentiate them from RP (Gimson reported a possible ongoing sound change in contemporary RP THOUGHT, if in doubt LOT should still be [ɒ] and not [ɔ], no-one has yet suggested that for RP). It might be a good idea to include recordings of earlier RP speakers for continuity to demonstrate how RP has changed over the years (closer to open TRAP, half-close to half-open FACE, changes in the schwa diphthongs NEAR SQUARE etc) and they are easier to find than contemporary speakers.

5/5/2018 06:49:09 pm

Yes, that is the same Ken Clarke. I was actually thinking that his PRICE showed some Midlands origin, but you might have noticed some difference in other vowels.

I'm not sure if that can be right about Tony Benn, as he would have been getting towards the end of his career by the time that the phrase "Estuary English" came about. There are a lot of clips of him online, as he had a cult following.

Sidney Wood link

5/6/2018 06:02:02 pm

Sorry Ed, you're correct. I meant Tony Blair. Must be Freudian. Here are Blair and Major in the House of Commons, undated but somewhere between 1990 and 1997, close to a decade aftr Rosewarne's first article (1984). Neither spoke RP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZUMEgHmCY8

5/9/2018 09:42:42 pm

There is here a recording of the 19th Century Prime Minister Gladstone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F957zdE3m8&t=16s

There is a transcript in the part underneath that says "Another real historic recording".

This is perhaps a variant of the sort of RPs that existed in the era of AJ Ellis. Gladstone was from Liverpool. His accent is clearly neither Scouse nor Lancashire, but he has some features from this part of the country. Ellis's work suggests that there were small regional variations in RP in the 19th century.

Sidney Wood link

5/11/2018 08:59:05 am

Sounds like the Edison phonograph recording. Its authenticity has been queried, Gladstone spoke his local Lancashire, not RP. Scouse evolved later in the 19th century.

5/12/2018 05:43:18 am

Yes, it is marked as the Edison phonograph recording. There is a good post here that agrees with your analysis.
http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the_virtual_linguist/2014/02/gladstonized.html

If RP existed in the 19th century, I would have expected Gladstone to speak it, as he came from a very wealthy family and boarded at Eton. Perhaps there were still only regional standards by this point in time.

Peter

5/11/2018 07:39:42 pm

I think this is a very interesting discussion. I am always trying to get my thoughts on RP and related matters in order, but I think I am approaching the issue from a different direction. I think of RP variation rather like ripples spreading out on a pond - at the centre is a very small point, a precise description of an ideal RP speaker at one point in time, such as the textbook descriptions of Jones and, later, Gimson (though of course both writers make it clear that some variation is possible). This might also be thought of as a theoretical template, or (perhaps pretentiously) as a Platonic ideal form of RP. But from this point the ripples spread out wider and wider, and eventually a point beyond the furthest ripple must be classed as outside the range of RP. It seems to me that in talking of speakers like William Hague and John Major you are looking near the outer limits, but nobody knows where those limits lie. As well as interpersonal variation such as that between two particular speakers, there is diachronic variation over the whole historic period involved in the description of RP. When I look at the totality of the accents that have been classed as RP by one writer or another, I feel that the variation is so great as to make any definition of RP almost meaningless; defining is, of course, much more difficult than describing. My inclination is to try to concentrate on the very small point from which the ripples spread, and then (since the term RP has been widened so much) call it something different. Incidentally, the little "Illustration" that I wrote for JIPA carries the name RP, but that was a matter in which I had no choice.

5/12/2018 10:57:11 am

This reminded me of a certain passage from John Wells (1982, p.301). I don't know whether John would still hold these views.

"Some people deny that RP exists. This seems to me like denying that the colour red exists. We may have difficulty in circumscribing it, ...but we all agree in identifying that fresh blood as typically having this colour, and almost all have a name for it...Similarly we may hesitate about a particular person's speech which might or might not be 'RP' or 'Near-RP'... but anyone who has grown up in England knows it when he hears a typical instance of it."

This conversation shows that it a lot harder to get an equivalent of fresh blood for RP. There doesn't seem to be much consensus on who is a pure RP speaker (except perhaps John Wells himself!), so it becomes a less useful concept than red.

With the issue of time, I remember something that Arnold Kellett wrote about Yorkshire dialect. (Writing from memory) He argued that saying that traditional Yorkshire dialect was still alive in the form of modern Yorkshire speech was akin to saying that Latin was still spoken in the form of Italian. No one in Bradford speaks even close to what Joseph Wright transcribed as his native dialect in 1892. The argument that RP has changed beyond recognition could be made for other dialects too.

Andrej Bjelaković

5/16/2018 06:24:31 am

All varieties of all languages change all the time. We know without looking that RP of people born cca. 1890 cannot be the same as RP of people born cca 1940, which in turn cannot be the same as RP of people born in the 1980s.

It seems to me that Sidney Wood likes to define RP through specific values of certain vowels. Defined like that RP is certainly moribund , with no native (or adoptive!) speakers born after... perhaps 1965 or 1970 or 1975. (I don't count an actor adopting an accent for a period piece as an adoptive speaker; on the other hand, a newsreader who consistently used an accent in their line of work I would consider an adoptive speaker of the given accent.)

This is what John Wells wrote about this matter, and I personally strongly prefer this approach:

“I prefer to define RP sociolinguistically, as the pronunciation of people at the upper end of the social scale – whatever that is at any given time. From this perspective, RP gradually changes as it incorporates elements from lower down” (Wells 1999).

Similarly, writing about U-RP, he said:

"Personally, I incline towards a sociological definition of U-RP, as the accent typically used at any given time by those belonging to the English upper class (not the upper middle class) — the aristocracy, the peerage and landed gentry, exemplified (but not necessarily very typically) by the royal family. As such it changes over time, and has changed remarkably rapidly over my lifetime, as we can see by comparing the Queen’s pronunciation and Prince Harry’s. So my answer to the question is ‘yes’. If we still have an identifiable upper class, then by definition we still have U-RP." (Wells 2007)

Andrej Bjelaković

5/16/2018 07:13:26 am

Also, on a related note, here's what Beverly Collins wrote (qtd. in Fabricius 2000:79) about informants in Fabricius' study (which was concerned with glottal replacement in contemporary RP); the informants were born between 1972 and 1979:

"They are RP speakers because it is not possible to determine their geographical origins with any degree of delicacy – they are clearly middle to upper-middle class rather than lower/working class. Even though their speech has one or two surprising features for the elderly or middle-aged person familiar with what we may term traditional RP… nevertheless overwhelmingly what they produce is a continuation of the 'RP tradition'."

In other words, features that constitute RP for the specific generation are those features that speakers from the upper end of the social scale from all over the country converge to, when striving to sound non-regional.

5/16/2018 08:12:22 pm

Hello, Andrej. Thank you for your message.

I think that it would be very difficult to maintain a focus on the upper classes and exclude even the upper middle classes. British society has changed so that modern socio-economic classifications such as NS-SEC do not use anything akin to an aristocratic or gentry class. The number of people who would be caught in Wells's second definition quoted would be very, very small. The first definition seems to allow for a broader sample doctors, lawyers, heads of industry, etc. as well, but I doubt that a doctor in Middlesbrough would typically speak the same way as a doctor in Wokingham, and the variation would probably be too large to show in a pronunciation dictionary.

It is good to cite an empirical study on RP. If it is to be defined sociologically, then the speech of the social group should be studied. There is only so much that can be inferred from listening to Cameron, Osborne and Johnson (all aristocrats) speak in Parliament.

Notable speakers of RP: revised post

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Notable speakers of RP: revised post

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A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of PhoneticsPeter Roach

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

Peter Roach