Notable speakers of RP: revised post

27/4/2018

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.

50 Comments

27/4/2018 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.

imran

22/6/2018 02:46:16 am

My is Imran lawan Gwammaja
I than you very much, even I'm Nigrian I'm using with your book.
my teach teaching me your book.

Peter

27/4/2018 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.

28/4/2018 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

30/4/2018 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

1/5/2018 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

1/5/2018 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

1/5/2018 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

1/5/2018 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).

2/5/2018 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

4/5/2018 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

4/5/2018 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

6/5/2018 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

9/5/2018 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

11/5/2018 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.

12/5/2018 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

11/5/2018 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.

12/5/2018 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

16/5/2018 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

16/5/2018 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.

16/5/2018 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.

Sidney Wood link

31/5/2018 12:43:56 pm

"It seems that SW likes to define RP through specific values of certain vowels" - almost, but say differentiate instead of define. Accents are pronunciation, and consequently fully defined by their total phonologies, including phoneme systems. So different accents have different phonologies. Comparisons give you lists of differences. So to differentiate between two accents, start by listening for a few phonemes that distinguish them. A more interesting question is why do I so often compare RP with regional Home Counies SBE? Firstly, RP belongs typologically to SBE and happens to be very close to regional Home Counties SBE, distinguished saliently by LOT, THOUGHT, MOUTH and GOAT. Secondly, Home Counties SBE is what you're most likely to hear today on the BBC, by academics, by officers etc (all groups traditionally expected to speak RP). Thirdly, Home Counties SBE and RP have existed sided by side for 100 years (HCSBE had evolved from 19th century sound changes in Kent and Essex that spread through the home counties and that are still spreading westwards). Finally, Home Counties SBE was still stigmatized and at the bottom of the popularity league in the 1950s. RP speakers are very hard to find today (the topic of this entire conversation). Peter Roach is looking for contemporary examples of RP for Wikipedia. Unfortunately, contemporary RP speakers seem to keep away from YouTube. Suggested examples usually turn out to be regional Home Counties SBE. The task is particularly difficult because Peter wants perfect RP examples without any provincialisms that would give away someone's failure to acquire RP completely.

Sidney Wood link

31/5/2018 12:52:36 pm

Thank you Andrej.

"All varieties of English change all the time" - Yes indeed, all accents change beyond recognition given enough time, and RP is no exception - during the last 200 years backing BATH from [a:] to [ɑ:], losing rhoticity (Ellis and Sweet probably heard the last elderly rhotic RP speakers, but hardly Jones), changing STRUT from [ʌ] to [a], TRAP was opened, GOAT was diphthongized from [ou] to [əʊ]. Gimson also suggested RP THOUGHT was changing from [ɔ:] to [o:], but that has hardly happened. But it takes more than a sound change to make an accent moribund. The problem for RP is that fewer and fewer people are acquiring it, hence the prediction that it's disappearing. There are several reasons for this. One is the education reform from the 1940s that opened the universities to many more people, mostly with regional acents, not RP. A second is that since the 1970s at least, the more conservative professions ceased insisting on RP for employment, so that adopted RP gradually disappeared, and the BBC admitted more and more regional speakers. Finally, attitudes towards regional accents changed, becoming more welcoming. Rosewarne picked up some of this in the 1980s and wrongly suggested there was a new accent. There wasn\t, it had been there since 1900 and partially since around 1800. RP hasn't disappeared yet. I saw a BBC TV progam recently about a man who had inherited a title and estate. He spoke regional Home Counties SBE, but his son spoke RP, presumably acquired in the 1990s.

31/5/2018 11:16:37 pm

It's good to see old AJ Ellis mentioned. He did use the acronym RP in his work, but I'm not really sure if it can be compared with what Jones, Gimson, etc. meant by the term. His use of RP seemed to more similar to what Wells meant by "General English".

Ellis is best known for looking at dialects rather than RP. When discussing the problems of using "educated people" as informants on dialects, he says on page 3:
The rp. adopted by my informants may have been different from my own, for there is no such thing as a uniform educated pron. of English, and rp. or rs. is a variable quantity differing from individual to individual, although all its varieties are "received," understood and mainly unnoticed.

Looking at page 236, it seems as if he still considered /e:/ to be RP for FACE and /o:/ to be RP for GOAT. (I say "seems as if" as it is not always easy to find the right modern symbol for the phonetic symbols that he used, but they are clearly monophthongs.)

I'm not sure if any of the dialects that AJ Ellis recorded exist in the same form any more. Is RP in the same category?

Sidney Wood link

2/6/2018 11:31:38 am

Ed, it's necessary to distinguish between the history of "RP etc" as an expression (its varying meaning and usage through time) and the pronunciation history of the accent now named RP. The standard procedures for reconstructing the evolution of an accent would include the work of the early orthoepists, for example, Christopher Cooper, 1687, The English Teacher, London, reproduced by Sundby, Bertil, 1953, Christopher Cooper's English Teacher, Lund Studies in English. Cooper referred to the "polite and educated" accent he was presenting, and his own "provincial" accent (he was headmaster of Hertford Grammar School and spoke the local accent that he also described in many comments). The story of the great vowel shift is also relevant. The standard solution (Jespersen, Luick etc) is u:>ʌw>aw for MOUTH, with the diphthong onset passing through back vowels, while Cooper gave the provincial version u:>ɛw (eventually æw), with the dipthong onset passing through front vowels. Ellis gave ɛw for the earlier Kent pronunciation, while the SDE Kentish informants (born 1860-1890) were changing to æw. In fact, Britain (David, 2008, On the wrong track - a non-standard history of non-standard /au/ in English, Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57) reports that ɛw/æw occurs worldwide. So the pronunciation of MOUTH is a good starting point for distinguishing between RP and regional accents (such as Home Counties or London SBE);
for example https://swphonetics.com/2018/05/31/rp-example-09/ (if I may).

Ellis's palaeotype has been translated into IPA (Eustace, S. S. (1969). ‘The meaning of palaeotype in A. J. Ellis's On Early English Pronunciation, 1869–89’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 31).

3/6/2018 01:07:41 pm

Hello, Sidney. Thank you for giving the reference to the Britain article. This is available here:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/4187924.pdf
I think that this is a very strong article.

I have never read Eustace's 1969 article but there is a reproduction of the chart here:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/EllisAtlas/Transcription.html
If this is correct, it seems difficult to find an equivalent of modern æ. On page 50 of the Britain paper, he states that aʊ was confined to middle-class London speech and western Cornwall in Ellis's work on southern England (I presume that he considers the use of aʊ in more northern areas to be irrelevant to RP). It seems as if this particular sound has been a social shibboleth in London since the days of AJ Ellis!

Sidney Wood link

4/6/2018 01:04:04 pm

Ed, the IPA has no character for the new open TRAP of SBE. This is an impossible vowel according according to Jones' cardinal vowels, cardinal 4 [a] is his front-most vowel. I'm working on this now:
(https://wp.me/p20lKX-6VN)
Bell had three unrounded open vowels, and Sweet had TRAP at Bell's open front. Jones reduced this to two unrounded open vowels, that happen to correspond to the French open vowels. The new open TRAP of RP wasn't noticed until about 50 years ago, although there's evidence it occurred already at the beginning of the 20th c. I wondered if that was out of respect for Jones, but Gimson didn't pick it up in 1962 although he had other revisions. Of the Kentish SDE informants (born 1865-1895), two still had the earlier closer TRAP while the others had the new open TRAP. H G Wells (born 1866 at Bromley) had the new open TRAP. So that's how I transcribe them - close [æ] (IPA [æ]) and open [æ]. So TRAP is a vowel that only briefly distinguished RP from regional SBE, if at all.

The open TRAP might have occurred in London, but there's plenty of evidence that TRAP was also so close it was actually [ɛ], with DRESS and KIT compressed towards FLEECE.

4/6/2018 08:40:38 pm

Hello, Sidney. When I said æ in my previous post, I was actually talking about the starting point of the diphthong in MOUTH words. I wasn't talking about TRAP. For someone like me, having grown up in Wakefield, it's quite hard to imagine anything other than [a] being standard in TRAP. There is no socio-linguistic variation in TRAP in most parts of northern England.

Thanks for the link to your site. I'll have a read.

Sidney Wood link

14/6/2018 11:14:27 am

In his first post above (27 April 2018), Peter Roach referred to YouTube recordings of RP examples, providing a link and requesting comments on that material. Following that link, recording 1 there was a BBC discussion with David Attenburgh taking part. I've now analysed that recording, along with Richard Leakey who also participated.

The result is here: https://wp.me/p20lKX-6Xb

Both speakers have typical RP accents in all respects except one: MOUTH was pronounced [aɒ] and not the expected [aʊ]. This puzzles me, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere as a variant within RP. Possible explanations include a regionalism or an unreported RP sound change. Both are no more than guesses, the linguistic history of these broadcasters is not known.

Andrej Bjelaković

20/6/2018 07:25:40 am

Some of this is surely due to the words in question not being stressed (e.g. 'about', some instances of 'now' etc.); in those cases the glide is expected to fall quite short of its usual target.

Sidney Wood link

20/6/2018 01:10:06 pm

Thank you Andrej. All the instances analysed for the diagrams were taken from fully focused syllables - the focal accent is the strongest stressing in a spoken phrase, so I ruled out vowel reduction. These MOUTH diphthongs by informant RP11 (and RP09 and RP10) are puzzling in an otherwise orthodox RP accent. I'm looking for earlier recordings by the same speakers for comparison to see if they occur there too.

23/6/2018 09:50:59 am

I've done a bit of research and cannot find record of any dialect in Britain that uses aɒ in these words. The best that I can come up with is that there is a large area in the East Midlands/Lower North that uses a: in these words and aɒ might be an approximation to RP for those who grew up using a:.

23/6/2018 09:54:51 am

Also thank you for doing the analysis in Praat and sharing it with us. It is very good.

Sidney Wood link

24/6/2018 03:00:58 pm

Thank you Ed, you're welcome. The search for contemporary RP continues.

Ajay

14/10/2018 07:47:46 pm

What is the name that female speaker who was born in 1953 and educated at Oxford University and lend her voice for recording

Peter

14/10/2018 09:05:17 pm

The speaker asked to remain anonymous.

Edward Aveyard

24/1/2019 08:50:48 am

Sad to say that Diana Athill has died today. I was reminded of this discussion by this news. Diana Athill was one of the few remaining who spoke that sort of RP.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/24/diana-athill-writer-and-editor-dies-aged-101

Peter Roach

24/1/2019 04:21:28 pm

Yes, that's sad. I wonder why she was not in the list of notable speakers. Some of the present list are not a lot younger.

Sidney Wood link

28/1/2019 11:36:22 am

Which underlines once again that RP is hard to come by these days, whether it's disappearing or hibernating. Changing the name to somethng else doesn't help, it's still the same accent, like roses. Worst of all so many can't distinguish RP from regional home counties SBE these days (judging from what comes up on the web).

Peter Roach

28/1/2019 12:48:14 pm

That's why a long time ago and after many people had asked me for advice (impossible to give) on how to get hold of RP speakers to study, I chose to recommend as a standard the pronunciation of English-born newsreaders and continuity announcers on present-day BBC Radio 3 and 4, and BBC1 and BBC2 TV. This provides a readily accessible standard and a small group of identifiable speakers. In my view the variation among this group of professional speakers is less than you would find in almost any other accent group. It is easy to record them off-air, and the quality of the recordings is always superb. Hence my choice of the name "BBC Pronunciation" that I use in my books. I have to say that public reaction to this has ranged from derision to indifference, with not much in between. It seems there is instead a growing use of the term "General British", which I don't like at all.

Sidney Wood link

29/1/2019 01:00:05 pm

I'm sorry, I can't agree that English-born BBC newsreaders etc is a source or substitute for elusive RP. The BBC offers just about every British accent these days, which is perfect for everybody whatever accent you're looking for, but you must know what you're looking for, what the accent of interest sounds like. You've probably just answered my question, why so many aren't aware of the difference between RP and home counties SBE.

I agree with you about GB. Giving RP a new name only adds to confusion.

Edward Aveyard

2/2/2019 03:27:57 pm

I didn't get notified of these responses by e-mail. I must have forgotten to tick the box.

I have taken the attitude to RP that Trudgill takes <a href="https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/trudgill.htm">here</a>. I have no time for those who value RP just because it was the speech of the upper class, but would have no problem with using it as a model for teaching English as a foreign language. As Trudgill says, you have to teach something.

If it is so hard to find anyone who speaks RP today, that does raise questions as to its suitability for foreign-language learners. If I were learning Mandarin, I wouldn't want to speak in a way that is hardly ever used in China any more. It is also much easier to learn to speak in a way that can be easily checked by turning on the telly or looking on YouTube.

Does anyone know if other languages have this problem? The only other language that I can speak to a reasonable standard is German. The impression that I get is that there is not really any equivalent to RP in German.

Sidney Wood link

4/2/2019 01:32:48 pm

Edward, that is the real problem for RP as an EFL teaching model - where are your UK teachers? Just check speech websites, all offering RP but none actually speaking it in their video clips. Overseas is different if there's still a strong tradition of teaching RP to teachers. But where are the students going to hear RP in real life? Old movies? You might still hear it on the BBC, but usually you won't know when it's coming.

Most languages have something they call a national standard, usually based on one of the regional variants, so RP in the UK was unique, promoted and codified and researched etc etc by members of the RP-speaking community itself. In Germany there are different phonologies in the north and south (and surely more). I've met Bavarians who wouldn't dream of adapting to a northern pronunciation. Let's leave that for German specialists. The frequent situation for other languages is that each dialect has its own sociolect scale. But humans are human and stigma often comes in somewhere. And stigma is the fault of the stigmatized, not the stigmatizer, so the verb stigmatized usually appears in the passive voice.

Edward Aveyard

6/2/2019 04:59:01 pm

I've realised that notification e-mails were being sent to my junk folder, although this was not the case before.

What do we think of Jacob Rees-Mogg as an RP speaker? He is widely regarded in the media as "posh" and often mocked for it. He allegedly struggled to communicate with locals when he went canvassing in Fife. Note as well that, if you play old films such as "Brief Encounter" to young people, they often find the language unclear as they're not used to it any more.

I'd personally say that, if it's a choice between teaching an RP that is no longer widely recognised and teaching a Home Counties English that is universally understood, the latter would be in the best interests of pupils.

With German, the issue of a standard pronunciation is probably not as important for foreign learners, as you can learn certain letter-to-sound rules that will make you understood. It might not be how most Germans speak naturally but spelling pronunciations can be used without being laughed at. This is not the same in English: the orthography is so irregular that no rules of spelling-to-pronunciation could ever suffice and it is necessary to learn the pronunciation of each word as you go.

Sidney Wood link

7/2/2019 12:02:18 am

Edward, he probably is, he's on my short list for closer investigation. I'm currently finishing a selection born in 1900-1925, then I'll do 1926-1950, then I'll get round to 1951-1975.

Home counties SBE as a model for EFL? Why not, that's what I was giving the Swedes in the 1950s, long before Rosewarne called it Estuary English. And it seems to be what all the speech coaches on the web are offering. To say nothing of the BBC.

Notable speakers of RP: revised post

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

Peter Roach

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Notable speakers of RP: revised post

Leave a Reply.

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