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  Peter Roach

The search for RP speakers

21/12/2015

4 Comments

 
I remember how difficult it was, when I was writing the IPA Specimen article on RP for publication in JIPA, to find a speaker who could be widely accepted as an authentic and contemporary RP speaker. Wikipedia has its own problems in this area: in WP's Received Pronunciation article, they chose to include a section titled 'Notable Speakers'. The contents of this section reads as follows: 

John C. Wells, a notable British phonetician, has identified the following people as RP speakers:

     The British Royal Family
     David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
     Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
     Rowan Williams, Former Archbishop of Canterbury
     Rupert Everett,
     Chris Huhne, former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
     Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury


Notice anything unusual about this list? Yes, they are all male apart from some members of the Royal Family. Some Wikipedian has suggested on the Talk Page that some female names might be added to the list, but as usual it is very hard to come up with the names of speakers who would be recognized by a bona fide phonetician to be RP speakers. The comment on the Talk page reads 'I think the idea of having a list of Notable Speakers of RP is good, and it is essential that every person listed there is referenced. I am unhappy that all those listed are referenced to John Wells, particularly as all seven individuals listed are male. Do any women speak RP apart from members of the British Royal Family?'  

A good question. Anyone who believes in RP is bound to answer 'yes'. But I bet you anything you like that nobody from the phonetics community will bother (or dare) to contribute any names, and will be happy to let this silly list stay as it is.

You probably know that I don't use the term RP in my own work, nor subscribe to its existence as a standard, so I am not a suitable person to propose candidates for the list!
4 Comments
Sidney Wood link
30/3/2016 01:47:08 pm

Like you I don't recognize RP as a standard, nor did the people who hired me to teach English 60 years ago. But several distinguished phoneticians still insist today it's not yet time to abandon RP as the model pronunciation for EFL. But RP speakers are indeed rare, estimates suggest 3-5% of the UK population, so there can't be many UK citizens capable and willing to teach it. Every accent is defined by its phonology. Some other accent will have a different phonology. That difference was intolerable to RP speakers in the past and anyone wanting to enter the professions was expected to adapt. There are perhaps not half a dozen phonemes that distinguish RP from Home Counties SBE but they were the shibboleths of the day. Your pronunciation of "how now ..." would decide if you were accepted at the front door or had to go round the back.

So where do you find your RP speakers? I live abroad and obviously don't meet any. You're a professor of phonetics in the UK and had difficulty finding some. Your only chance is to record the radio continuously until one turns up. And of course you could hire an actor if you're prepared to pay.

Unlike you I still use the term RP for the sake of continuity. It's been the name of the accent for more than 200 years, it's described in the literature. And if the RP accent is disappearing, as some have suggested, then I don't see the point in changing its name just for the demise.

Reply
Ed
1/4/2016 12:53:30 pm

There's one thing that I've always wondered about the long-standing debate on the name. Why are we happy to use "Standard German" and "Standard Dutch" for the pronunciation of these languages taught to foreigners, but we insist that "Standard English" refers only to the written form of English?

I wonder if there are any statistics of the proportion of Germans who speak Standard German. From my anecdotal experience, it cannot be much larger than the proportion of RP/BBC speakers in Britain.

Reply
David Marjanović
6/1/2018 01:43:42 pm

<blockquote>the proportion of Germans who speak Standard German</blockquote>

That's hardly comparable to RP. RP is supposed to be a prestige <i>accent</i>. Standard German is <i>Schriftsprache</i>, Written German, first and foremost – its grammar, vocabulary (within a wide range), and some vague approximation of phonology. Many different accents are accepted as Standard German if they can be mapped to the spelling in a more or less predictable and straightforward way. There is a codified stage pronunciation, but outside the most prestigious theatres very, very few people (perhaps five in total) use it; it's a deliberately artificial concoction that consists by half of very northern features (because Theodor Siebs was born on the coast) and artificial features designed for theatre acoustics.

This is not to say everybody speaks Standard German with the phonetics of the local dialect; far from it. Still, all the Standard accents are distinctively regional. The only just about non-regional accent (I can't place it more precisely than "Germany") is used by the actor Sky du Mont and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else; it may be pertinent that the good man was born in Argentina.

The accents taught to foreigners are simply the ones the teachers use when they speak Standard German (whether or not they do that natively). By sheer numbers, those are most often those of northern-but-not-too-northern Germany.

Reply
David Marjanović
6/1/2018 01:45:41 pm

Incomplete atlas of phonetic variation within contemporary Standard German: http://prowiki.ids-mannheim.de/bin/view/AADG/WebHome (in German)

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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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