Non regional voices:

Received pronounciation:

Received Pronunciation ( RP) is the proper term to describe the regionally neutral accent used by many middle class speakers in England. It is widely used as a reference point in dictionaries and as a model for teaching English as a foreign language. But have you ever wondered how it came into existence, how it is changing or what role it plays in 21st century Britain?

Received Pronunciation, or RP for short, is the instantly recognisable accent often described as ‘typically British’. Popular terms for this accent, such as ‘The Queen’s English’, ‘Oxford English’ or ‘BBC English’ are all a little misleading.

The Queen, for instance, speaks an almost unique form of English, while the English we hear at Oxford University or on the BBC is no longer restricted to one type of accent. RP is an accent, not a dialect, since all RP speakers speak Standard English.

In other words, they avoid non-standard grammatical constructions and localised vocabulary characteristic of regional dialects. RP is also regionally non-specific, that is it does not contain any clues about a speaker’s geographic background. But it does reveal a great deal about their social and/or educational background.

RP is probably the most widely studied and most frequently described variety of spoken English in the world, yet recent estimates suggest only 2% of the UK population speak it. Received pronounciation is losing it's prestige in most places including Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

As well as being a living accent, RP is also a theoretical linguistic concept. It is the accent on which phonemic transcriptions in dictionaries are based, and it is widely used (in competition with General American) for teaching English as a foreign language.

Origins of RP.

RP is a young accent in linguistic terms. It was not around, for example, when Dr Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language in 1757. He chose not to include pronunciation suggestions as he felt there was little agreement even within educated society regarding ‘recommended’ forms.

The phrase Received Pronunciation was coined in 1869 by the linguist, A J Ellis, but it only became a widely used term used to describe the accent of the social elite after the phonetician, Daniel Jones, adopted it for the second edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1924).

The definition of ‘received’ conveys its original meaning of ‘accepted’ or ‘approved’ - as in ‘received wisdom’. We can trace the origins of RP back to the public schools and universities of nineteenth-century Britain - indeed Daniel Jones initially used the term Public School Pronunciation to describe this emerging, socially exclusive accent.

Over the course of that century, members of the ruling and privileged classes increasingly attended boarding schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and graduated from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Their speech patterns - based loosely on the local accent of the south-east Midlands (roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge) - soon came to be associated with ‘The Establishment’ and therefore gained a unique status, particularly within the middle classes in London. As a result of this, the RP accent became heavily associated with being well-educated, well spoken and ultimately being a part of a higher socio-economic demographic.

RP is believed to be the best understood form of English and therefore was adopted by the BBC for broadcasting purposes; (hence the term BBC English). The fact that choosing a regional dialect may have alienated the audience was also taken into consideration when choosing a dialect for broadcasting.

But since RP was the preserve of the aristocracy and expensive public schools, it represented only a very small social minority. This policy prevailed at the BBC for a considerable time and probably contributed to the sometimes negative perception of regional varieties of English.

There's more than one type of Received Pronounciation;

A speaker who uses numerous very localised pronunciations is often described as having a ‘broad’ or ‘strong’ regional accent, while terms such as ‘mild’ or ‘soft’ are applied to speakers whose speech patterns are only subtly different from RP speakers.

So, we might describe one speaker as having a broad Glaswegian accent and another as having a mild Scottish accent. Such terms are inadequate when applied to Received Pronunciation, although as with any variety of English, RP encompasses a wide variety of speakers and should not be confused with the notion of ‘posh’ speech.

The various forms of RP can be roughly divided into three categories.

Conservative RP refers to a very traditional variety particularly associated with older speakers and the aristocracy.

Mainstream RP describes an accent that we might consider extremely neutral in terms of signals regarding age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker.

Contemporary RP refers to speakers using features typical of younger RP speakers.

All, however, are united by the fact they do not use any pronunciation patterns that allow us to make assumptions about where they are from in the UK

RP Today:

Like any other accent, RP has also changed over the course of time. The voices we associate with early BBC broadcasts, for instance, now sound extremely old-fashioned to most. Just as RP is constantly evolving, so our attitudes towards the accent are changing.

For much of the twentieth century, RP represented the voice of education, authority, social status and economic power. The period immediately after the Second World War was a time when educational and social advancement suddenly became a possibility for many more people.

 Those who were able to take advantage of these opportunities - be it in terms of education or career - often felt under considerable pressure to conform linguistically and thus adopt the accent of the establishment or at least modify their speech towards RP norms.

In recent years, however, as a result of continued social change, virtually every accent is represented in all walks of life to which people aspire - sport, the arts, the media, business, even former strongholds of RP England, such as the City, Civil Service and academia. As a result, fewer younger speakers with regional accents consider it necessary to adapt their speech to the same extent.

Indeed many commentators even suggest that younger RP speakers often go to great lengths to disguise their middle-class accent by incorporating regional features into their speech.



Geordie dialect:

The UK has a number of distinctive dialects, and Geordie – the dialect of Newcastle-upon-Tyne – is arguably one of our most recognisable.

The word Geordie refers both to a native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and to the speech of the inhabitants of that city. There are several theories about the exact origins of the term Geordie, but all agree it derives from the local pet name for George.

Geordie should only refer to the speech of the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the surrounding urban area of Tyneside. Locals insist there are significant differences between Geordie and several other local dialects, such as Pitmatic and Makkem.

Pitmatic is the dialect of the former mining areas in County Durham and around Ashington to the north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while Makkem is used locally to refer to the dialect of the city of Sunderland and the surrounding urban area of Wearside.

For many people these different identities are expressed in the way they speak. To the south, speakers in rural County Durham and North Yorkshire are sometimes affectionately referred to as Farm Yakkers, while Smoggies — the inhabitants of Middlesbrough and the surrounding urban area of Teesside — have their own distinctive dialect, too.

History:

This is not surprising given that speech in this part of the country is descended from the dialect that emerged approximately 1,500 years ago in the mouths of Anglo-Saxon settlers from continental Europe. The North East was settled mainly by the Angles, as was most of central and northern Britain in the centuries following the decline of Roman rule in the early fifth century AD.

The Angles came from the area around the border between Denmark and Germany and the language they spoke evolved into a number of Old English dialects often grouped together under the term Northumbrian.

Other dialect groups that emerged elsewhere in the UK include Mercian, spoken in the Midlands, Wessex in the South and West of England, and Kentish in the far South East. As the name implies, the Northumbrian dialects occupied an area northwards of a rough line drawn from the River Humber in the East to the River Ribble in the West (corresponding approximately with today’s M62 motorway). This dialect area therefore also includes Scotland.

Many contemporary Geordie dialect words, such as gan (‘go’ – modern German gehen) and bairn (‘child’ - modern Danish barn) can still trace their roots right back to the Angles.


Minority ethnic English:

For more than half a century, immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies have added variety and diversity to the rich patchwork of accents and dialects spoken in the UK.

British colonisers originally exported the language to all four corners of the globe and migration in the 1950s brought altered forms of English back to these shores. Since that time, especially in urban areas, speakers of Asian and Caribbean descent have blended their mother tongue speech patterns with existing local dialects producing wonderful new varieties of English, such as London Jamaican or Bradford Asian English.

Standard British English has also been enriched by an explosion of new terms, such as balti (a dish invented in the West Midlands and defined by a word that would refer to a 'bucket' rather than food to most South Asians outside the UK) and bhangra (traditional Punjabi music mixed with reggae and hip-hop).

Slang:

As with the Anglo-Saxon and Norman settlers of centuries past, the languages spoken by today’s ethnic communities have begun to have an impact on the everyday spoken English of other communities. For instance, many young people, regardless of their ethnic background, now use the black slang terms, nang (‘cool,’) and diss (‘insult’ — from ‘disrespecting’) or words derived from Hindi and Urdu, such as chuddies (‘underpants’) or desi (‘typically Asian’).

 Many also use the all-purpose tag-question, innit — as in statements such as you’re weird, innit. This feature has been variously ascribed to the British Caribbean community or the British Asian community, although it is also part of a more native British tradition - in dialects in the West Country and Wales, for instance — which might explain why it appears to have spread so rapidly among young speakers everywhere.

Original influences from overseas

The English Language can be traced back to the mixture of Anglo-Saxon dialects that came to these shores 1500 years ago. Since then it has been played with, altered and transported around the world in many different forms.

The language we now recognise as English first became the dominant language in Great Britain during the Middle Ages, and in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From there it has been exported in the mouths of colonists and settlers to all four corners of the globe. ‘International English’, ‘World English’ or ‘Global English’ are terms used to describe a type of ‘General English’ that has, over the course of the twentieth century, become a worldwide means of communication.

American English:

The first permanent English-speaking colony was established in North America in the early 1600s. The Americans soon developed a form of English that differed in a number of ways from the language spoken back in The British Isles. In some cases older forms were retained — the way most Americans pronounce the <r> sound after a vowel in words like start, north, nurse and letter is probably very similar to pronunciation in 17th century England. Similarly, the distinction between past tense got and past participle gotten still exists in American English but has been lost in most dialects of the UK.

But the Americans also invented many new words to describe landscapes, wildlife, vegetation, food and lifestyles. Different pronunciations of existing words emerged as new settlers arrived from various parts of the UK and established settlements scattered along the East Coast and further inland.

 After the USA achieved independence from Great Britain in 1776 any sense of who ‘owned’ and set the ‘correct rules’ for the English Language became increasingly blurred. Different forces operating in the UK and in the USA influenced the emerging concept of a Standard English.

The differences are perhaps first officially promoted in the spelling conventions proposed by Noah Webster in The American Spelling Book (1786) and subsequently adopted in his later work, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Both of these publications were enormously successful and established spellings such as center and color and were therefore major steps towards scholarly acceptance that British English and American English were becoming distinct entities.

Elsewhere in the British Empire; English imposed as an administrative language, spoken as a mother tongue by colonial settlers from the UK, but in most cases as a second language by the local population.

English around the world:

Cultural and political ties have meant that until relatively recently British English has acted as the benchmark for representing ‘standardised’ English — spelling tends to adhere to British English conventions, for instance. Elsewhere in Africa and on the Indian subcontinent, English is still used as an official language in several countries, even though these countries are independent of British rule.

However, English remains very much a second language for most people, used in administration, education and government and as a means of communicating between speakers of diverse languages. As with most of the Commonwealth, British English is the model on which, for instance, Indian English or Nigerian English is based. In the Caribbean and especially in Canada, however, historical links with the UK compete with geographical, cultural and economic ties with the USA, so that some aspects of the local varieties of English follow British norms and others reflect US usage.

An international language:

English is also hugely important as an international language and plays an important part even in countries where the UK has historically had little influence.

It is learnt as the principal foreign language in most schools in Western Europe. It is also an essential part of the curriculum in far-flung places like Japan and South Korea, and is increasingly seen as desirable by millions of speakers in China. Prior to WWII, most teaching of English as a foreign language used British English as its model, and textbooks and other educational resources were produced here in the UK for use overseas.

This reflected the UK's cultural dominance and its perceived ‘ownership’ of the English Language. Since 1945, however, the increasing economic power of the USA and its unrivalled influence in popular culture has meant that American English has become the reference point for learners of English in places like Japan and even to a certain extent in some European countries.

British English remains the model in most Commonwealth countries where English is learnt as a second language. However, as the history of English has shown, this situation may not last indefinitely. The increasing commercial and economic power of countries like India, for instance, might mean that Indian English will one day begin to have an impact beyond its own borders.