Received Pronunciation

Variants of English pronunciation

English is a global language spoken by approximately 1,500 million people. This has been caused by a number of geographical, historical, and socio-cultural factors: the British colonization, the impact of American power in political life and in business, esp. in computer software and entertainment industries. As a result of this spread over the world English is not uniform, there are many “Englishes” while the written forms have a lot more in common.

Geographically native English accents are divided into British-oriented (the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and North- America-oriented (the USA and Canada).

Most of the countries have their national pronunciation standards, regional standards and local dialects.

National Standards:

o RP (Received Pronunciation), or BBC English, Public School pronunciation, King’s English, in the UK;

o GA (General American), or American Network English, in the USA;

o Gen Can (General Canadian) in Canada;

o Gen Aus (General Australian) in Australia.

National pronunciation standards are associated with radio and TV newsreaders and presenters of serious channels (Channel 3 and 4 on BBC, CBS and NBC on American Network). These are also professional groups and public figures whose speech is symbolic of certain types of accents.

Regional Standards are smaller geographical divisions, which are the accents of educated people in a certain area:

o Southern, Northern, Scottish and Northern Irish on the British Isles (the Welsh educated accent is confused either with the Scottish or the Southern type);

o Northern, Northern Midland, Southern Midland, Southern, Western in the USA.

Regional standards show a certain degree of regional deviation from the standard. In the UK people in the South-East of the country are closest to RP since this area was the origin of the national standard.

In the USA it is people from the North, North Midland and the West who show the least differences from GA, since the origin of the American standard is the Great Lakes area, i.e. the North. Newsreaders for American radio and TV are selected from people who are from the North, North Midland and the West or they are trained to sound as if they are. American national news agencies and radio stations are located in the North-East, while the entertainment industry is stationed in the West (in Hollywood).

British regional features:

Northern /u/ in such words as cut, much, love; Scottish /a/ in words like bad, bath; /hw/ in words beginning with wh: which, where, etc.; /х’/ in words like light; trilled /r/; Irish: /r/ in all positions, clear /l/.

American regional features:

Southern /r/ is vocalized after a vowel, as in river (Americans say that the second /r/ is gone with the wind); Southern drawl: a specific way of pronouncing vowels when monophthongs are diphthongized while diphthongs are monophthongized, i.e. their nuclei are prolonged and their glides are dropped, e.g. side[sa:d], tide [ta:d]; [ɪ] in men, ten.

Local accents are used by less educated people. They can be either urban (characteristic of a city, like Liverpool or N.Y.) or rural (spoken in the countryside, like South Wales).

Received Pronunciation

The status of RP has changed. British phoneticians agree that RP is still an accepted social standars associated with the speech of BBC announcers. But over the last 20 years both the BBC and other national radio and TV channels have been increasingly tolerant of broadcasters’ accents. Nevertheless in their choice of newsreaders the national TV and radio channels still use predominantly RP speakers. However RP is an accent of such a small minority that there may be more foreign speakers of RP than native speakers of that accent of English (Crystal 1997). RP is a social prestige accent spoken by 3 – 5% of the population.

RP is classified into General RP, Refined RP and Regional RP. Refined RP is an upper-class accent, mainly associated with upper-class families and with professions which have been traditionally recruited from such families, e.g. officers in the navy. The number of speakers is declining: this type of speech is often regarded as affected. Some of the particular features of Refined RP:

/ǝu/ is pronounced as /eu/;

a very open final /ǝ/ and /ɪ/: bett er, cit y;

/ǝ:/ is very open in all positions;

/æ/ is often diphthongized - /æǝ/: underst a nd.

Regional RP reflects regional variation, it describes the type of speech which is basically RP except for the presence of a few regional characteristics, e.g. the use of [a/æ] instead of [a:] before voiceless fricatives: after, bath, past, which is a sign of the northern accent within England.

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