Phonological and phonetic features of RP
The historical origins of RP go back to the 16th-17th century recommendations that the speech model should be that provided by the educated pronunciation of the court and the capital. Thus, the roots of RP are in London, more particularly the pronunciation of the London region and the Home Counties lying around London within 60 miles.
By the 19th century London English had increasingly acquired social prestige losing some of its local characteristics. It was finally fixed as the pronunciation of the ruling class.
In the mid 19th century there was an increase in education, in particular, there occurred the rise of public schools (since 1864 Public School Act). Since that time London English or Southern English was termed as Classroom English, Public School English or Educated English.
By 1930 the term “Standard Pronunciation” was replaced by “Received Pronunciation” (RP), which had been introduced for Southern Educated English by phonetician Ida Ward who defined it as pronunciation whish had lost all easily noticeable local differences.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) adopted RP for the use by its news-readers since 1920s. For that reason RP was often called BBC English.
According to Prof. J.C. Wells contemporary RP does not constitute a single variety but a set of varieties correlating with the speaker’s education, social status and other social factors.
Estuary English (EE) received great media attention in 1993 as the new standard English. It resembles RP and Cockney but is not equal to any of them.
Major linguistic sources for RP. The first description and codification of RP was made by professor Daniel Jones in his books The Pronunciation of English (1909) and Outline of English Phonetics (1917). Professor Alfred Charles Gimson gave an explicit description of RP in the middle of the 20th century in his book An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. One of the most authoritative and detailed descriptions of all major accents of English was made by professor John C. Wells in his three-volume Accents of English.
Now we will outline segmental parameters of RP/BBC English.
As for its phoneme inventory, this accent has 20 vowels and 24 consonants. The system of vowels embrace 12 pure vowels or monophthongs: i:, I, e, {, V, A:, Q, O:, P, u:, 3:, @, and 8 diphthongs: eI, aI, OI, @P, aP, I@, e@, P@.
According to the phonotactic specification of /r/ occurrence, RP is a non-rhotic or r-less accent, i.e. /r/ does not occur after a vowel or at the end of the words.
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Phoneme lexical distribution. The recent and current changes in RP embrace the decline of weak [I], glottalling, l-vocalization, intrusive /r/ and yod-coalescence.
Decline of weak [ I ]. The vowel [I] is becoming less frequent in weak syllables. Traditional RP [I] is yielding ground: 1) on the one hand to [i], in final and pre-vocalic positions: happy ["h{pi], coffee ["kQfi], and prevocalically in various ["ve@ri@s]; 2) on the other hand, in preconsonantal positions, to [@]. This trend is found particularly in the endings -less, -ness, -ily, -ity and adjectival -ate, and to some extent also in -ed, -es, -et, -ace: quality ["kwQl@tI], deliberate [de"lIb@r@t], angrily ["{Ngr@lI].
Glottallingis the switch from an alveolar to a glottal articulation of /t/, whereby [t] is pronounced as [?] in a range of syllable-final environments. This is by now very firmly established in casual RP before obstruents (football ["fP?bO:l], it’s quite good [I?s kwaI? gPd]) and is increasingly heard before other consonants (atmosphere ["{?m@sfI@]).
L vocalization is the development whereby the dark allophone of /l/ loses its alveolar lateral nature and becomes a vowel of the [o] or [U] type. L vocalization is accordingly restricted to the preconsonantal and word-final environments. Examples are: milk [mIok], middle [mIdo].
Intrusive R is very prevalent in RP. It involves the insertion of an r-sound at the end of a word ending in a non-high vowel (usually one of @, I@, A:,O:] where the next word begins with a vowel, as in put a comma [r] in, the idea[r] of it, I saw[r] it happen.
There is a strong tendency towards coalescence of yod with a preceding alveolar plosive, so that:
t+j= tS, d+j=dZ (the process of affricatization);
s+j=S, z+j=Z (the process of assibilation).
The words actual, mutual, education, educate, gradual, during, virtue, statue, issue, hosier, etc have common alternative forms with affricates or sibilants, the latter gaining ground as the dominant form.
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