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  Peter Roach

RP - beyond England?

9/6/2015

3 Comments

 
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!
3 Comments
Sidney Wood link
12/6/2015 06:28:46 am

I agree with what you say at the end: "an accent either is, or is not, RP". It has been defined in such detail by Jones, Gimson, and Wells, and it is so unique both in its sociology and phonology, there can be only one RP. Trudgill made a similar comment about "near-RP", a miss is as good as a mile.

As to the question you cite, the author seems to be overlooking the notion of sociolects - every regional accent has a sociolect scale from popular to standard (following Wells' terminology).

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Peter238
30/6/2015 12:49:34 pm

Well, according to Wells, an accent that approximates RP is simply near-RP, and the 'cultivated' accents of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all fall under this name. But from what I read about the Cultivated SAE (check "South African English" on WP, sections "Bibliography" and "Further reading"), it may be extremely close or identical with RP, so that's interesting. If that's really the case, the choice between calling these people "speakers of RP" and "speakers of Cultivated SAE" is entirely arbitrary.

Reply
Sidney Wood link
4/8/2015 04:41:24 am

There's one area at least where it's necessary to discriminate between RP and other accents, for determining the individual level of success in acquiring RP. Actors need to learn RP for a credible performance (an Edwardian aristocrat wouldn't have sounded like the servants downstairs). Anyone who still wants to adopt RP in preference to their regional accent needs to know when they're home, or what's left to work on, especially if the enterprise is expensive. Above all, several prominent phoneticians are still saying that the time is not yet ripe to accept other British accents as models for British EFL, it's still RP only. So we still need criteria for determining if an accent is unsuitable or not for EFL teaching.

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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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