Received Pronunciation

Finding a model

Early in the twentieth century Daniel Jones described the model accent presented in An English Pronouncing Dictionary as

that most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public [in the English sense of the word, i.e. private fee-paying] boarding-schools. This pronunciation is also used by a considerable proportion of those who do not come from the South of England, but who have been educated at these schools. The pronunciation may also be heard, to an extent which is considerable though difficult to specify, from persons of education in the South of England who have not been educated at these schools. It is probably accurate to say that a majority of those members of London society who have had a university education, use either this pronunciation or a pronunciation not differing very greatly from it. (Jones 1917: viii)

Jones’s location of his model accent reflects social considerations of his time, with its reference to “men-folk” (then overwhelmingly the products of the public-school system) and the socially and economically dominant “London society”, and emphasis on the normalizing force of public school education: indeed, so crucial is this element to his divination of his model that Jones initially calls it Public School Pronunciation, or PSP. Although non-Southerners might acquire the accent through privileged schooling, its possession is much more likely amongst educated Southerners.

Living in a hierarchical, south-east-focused and male-dominated world, Jones’s stance on a model accent was understandable, and might be expected to have passed unquestioned in his day. Early twentieth-century assumptions are not necessarily ours, however: education is now more democratic in respect of both gender and class, and Southern England no longer holds a grip on linguistic prestige which it had on Britain a century ago. And to be fair to Jones, he himself was not completely locked into a narrow description of the accent. Despite the time-bound socio-cultural assumptions apparent in his description of his model, as the century progressed, although the essential prescription remained “public school” turned to “boarding school”, “London society” became “Londoners”, and by 1926 his label had become “Received Pronunciation” or RP (a term first used, though not as a specific label, by A.J. Ellis [1869: 23]). Further, he shows himself to be prepared to keep the boundaries of the accent and its speaker-base fuzzy, from the first not-ing “the delusion under which many lexicographers appear to have laboured, viz. that all educated speakers pronounce alike” (Jones 1917: viii).

If Jones could be open-minded about his model and its speakers, it is now time for us to be still more relaxed about the RP we acknowledge. The accent that has for a long time been regarded as a model in dictionaries and language-teaching texts is becoming much more widely based than it once was. There will always be a rearguard that deplores changes in the accent, as it will language change of any kind, and even some linguists out of touch with developments in England might misunderstand, but we should not on their behalf make the model too precious or confine its speaker-base to an elite.

Gimson makes the case for the acknowledgement of ongoing developments in the accent when, having outlined tendencies being shown by the accent in 1984, he writes:

 f a different set of criteria for defining RP […] is adopted, together with a range of acceptable tolerances within the model, which will result in a somewhat diluted form of the traditional standard, the re-defined RP may be expected to fulfil a new and more extensive role in present-day British society. (Gimson 1984: 53)

That new role can most prominently be observed in the use of RP as the scarcely remarked-upon ‘background’ accent of the media newsreader. But despite Gimson’s counsel, a commonly-held view persists that RP is a very narrow class-based and region-based variety of English pronunciation. This is in part the result of a peculiarly British attitude towards accent variety:

The British are today particularly sensitive to variations in the pronunciation of their language. […] Such extreme sensitivity is apparently not paralleled in any other country or even in other parts of the English-speaking world. (Cruttenden 1994: 76)

Britons are indeed remarkably judgemental about all accents. That RP, when judged in the abstract, tends to be considered remote from the speech of most Britons suggests that a rarified version of the accent remains the target of people’s perceptions, unsurprising if one considers the transcriptions which are frequently offered up, where the model lags behind Gimson’s expectations.

The RP model with which native speakers and learners alike continue to be confronted is ultimately, of course, a matter of sounds: that is, phonetic realization of the phonemes of Received Pronunciation dictates the variety. But creating no little problem for the model is the choice of symbols by which those phonemes are described. The phonemic inventory of RP is often represented by a symbol set that was entirely appropriate when Jones began its description. Such have been the developments in the accent, however, that another transcription might now be thought more appropriate for some phonemes. Yet still the old description persists, a tradition of transcription being retained that fully supports Wells’s description of the accent as “characteristic of the upper class and (to an extent) the upper-middle class” (Wells 1982: 10). The result is a situation in which traditionalists feel justified in insisting on the sounds transcribed, as if the symbols were phonetic rather than phonemic representations (while pragmatic users reproduce whatever sounds seem appropriate to them when they see the symbols).

Important to this topics are transcription conventions first deployed in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and subsequently in all the larger native-speaker dictionaries of Oxford University Press, and, alongside North American transcriptions, in The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (Upton, Kretzschmar and Konopka 2001). These transcriptions are different in some small but significant particulars from those that might be encountered elsewhere in descriptions of Received Pronunciation, most notably as regards the TRAP, PRICE, and SQUARE vowels. They are descriptive of the reality of the kind of modern, “diluted” Received Pronunciation called for by Gimson twenty years ago.