Definitions:

Received Pronunciation (often abbreviated as RP) is the accent traditionally

regarded as the standard for British English.[1] For over a century there has been
argument over such issues as the definition of RP, whether it is geographically
neutral, how many speakers there are, whether sub-varieties exist, how appropriate
a choice it is as a standard and how the accent has changed over time.[2] RP is an
accent, so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation; other
areas relevant to the study of language standards such
as vocabulary, grammar and style are not considered.

/ is the accent usually described as typically British. Find out more about its origins
and its current status in the UK.
 Names and abbreviations

1-RP
2-

1- Received Pronunciation 
2- Public School Pronunciation
3- received standard
4- "BBC Pronunciation"
5- The Queen's/King's English
6- "General British"
7- "Non-Regional Pronunciation"
8- "Oxford English"
9- "Standard Southern British"
10- "gentry" ‫ الطبقة الحاكمة‬،‫ األرستقراطية‬،‫الطبقة العليا‬upperclass
11- ‘BBC English’
 History
RP has most in common with the dialects of South East Midlands, namely
London, Oxford and Cambridge.[3] By the end of the 15th century, "Standard
English" was established in the City of London, though it did not begin to resemble
RP until the late 19th century.[4][5]
The introduction of the term Received Pronunciation is usually credited to the
British phonetician Daniel Jones. In the first edition of the English Pronouncing
Dictionary (1917) he named the accent "Public School Pronunciation" but for the
second edition in 1926 he wrote: "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation,
for want of a better term."[6] However, the term had been used much earlier by P. S.
Du Ponceau in 1818.[7] A similar term, received standard, was coined by Henry C.
K. Wyld in 1927.[8] The early phonetician Alexander John Ellis used both terms
interchangeably, but with a much broader definition than Jones's, saying, "There is
no such thing as a uniform educated pron. of English, and rp. and rs. is a variable
quantity differing from individual to individual, although all its varieties are
'received', understood and mainly unnoticed".[9]
According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), "the correct term is 'the
Received Pronunciation'.

/RP: a social accent of English

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.

Well-known but not widely used

RP is probably the most widely studied and most frequently described variety of
spoken English in the world, yet recent estimates suggest only 3% of the UK
population speak it. It has a negligible presence in Scotland and Northern Ireland
and is arguably losing its prestige status in Wales. It should properly, therefore, be
described as an English, rather than a British accent. 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.
RP is included here as a useful reference, not to imply it has greater merit than any
other English accent, but because it provides us with an extremely familiar model
against which comparisons with other accents may be made.
 Notes:
Characteristics and status[edit]

Traditionally, Received Pronunciation has been associated with high social class. It
was the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-
folk [had] been educated at the great public boarding-schools"[31] and which
conveyed no information about that speaker's region of origin before attending the
school. An 1891 teacher's handbook stated, “It is the business of educated people
to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was
passed”.[32] Nevertheless, in the 19th century some British prime ministers, such
as William Ewart Gladstone, still spoke with some regional features.[33]

Opinions differ over the proportion of Britons who speak RP. Trudgill estimated

3% in 1974,[34] but that rough estimate has been questioned by J. Windsor Lewis.
[35]
 Upton notes higher estimates of 5% (Romaine, 2000) and 10% (Wells, 1982)
but refers to these as "guesstimates" not based on robust research.[36]

The claim that RP is non-regional is disputed, since it is most commonly found in

London and the southeast of England. It is defined in the Concise Oxford English
Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the South of England",
[37]
 and alternative names such as “Standard Southern British” have been used.
[38]
 Despite RP's historic high social prestige in Britain,[39] being seen as the accent
of those with power, money, and influence, it may be perceived negatively by
some as being associated with undeserved, or accidental, privilege[40][41] and as a
symbol of the southeast's political power in Britain.[41] Based on a 1997 survey,
Jane Stuart-Smith wrote, "RP has little status in Glasgow, and is regarded with
hostility in some quarters".[42] A 2007 survey found that residents of Scotland and
Northern Ireland tend to dislike RP.[43] It is shunned by some with left-wing
political views, who may be proud of having accents more typical of the working
classes.[44] Since the Second World War, and increasingly since the 1960s, a wider
acceptance of regional English varieties has taken hold in education and public life.
[45][46]

Media[edit]

In the early days of British broadcasting, speakers of English origin almost

universally used RP. In 1926 the BBC established an Advisory Committee on
Spoken English with distinguished experts, including Daniel Jones, to advise on
the correct pronunciation and other aspects of broadcast language. The Committee
proved unsuccessful and was dissolved after the Second World War.[47] An
interesting departure from the use of RP involved the BBC's use of Yorkshire-
born Wilfred Pickles as a newsreader during the Second World War to distinguish
BBC broadcasts from German propaganda.[48][49] Since the Second World War RP
has played a much smaller role in broadcast speech. In fact, as Catherine Sangster
points out, "there is not (and never was) an official BBC pronunciation standard".
[50]
 RP remains the accent most often heard in the speech of announcers and
newsreaders on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and in some TV channels, but non-RP
accents are now more widely encountered.[51]

/Broadcaster’s choice

RP probably received its greatest impetus, however, when it was selected in 1922 by
the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English as a broadcasting standard – hence
the origins of the term BBC English. The Committee believed Standard English,
spoken with an RP accent, would be the most widely understood variety of English, both
here in the UK and overseas. Members of the committee were also conscious that
choosing a regional accent might run the risk of alienating some listeners. To a certain
extent their decision was understandable, and their attitude only reflected the social
climate at the time. 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.

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 20th 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.

Features:
 Examples:

Reasons:
The word 'received' conveys its original meaning of 'accepted' or 'approved', as in
'received wisdom'."[10]

/ What’s in the name?

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 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
19th-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.
 Types:
Sub-varieties:
Faced with the difficulty of defining a single standard of RP, some researchers
have tried to distinguish between sub-varieties:

 Gimson (1980) proposed Conservative, General, and Advanced;

"Conservative RP" referred to a traditional accent associated with older
speakers with certain social backgrounds; General RP was considered
neutral regarding age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker; and Advanced
RP referred to speech of a younger generation of speakers.[26] Later editions
(e.g., Gimson 2008) use the terms General, Refined and Regional RP. In the
latest revision of Gimson's book, the terms preferred are General British
(GB), Conspicuous GB and Regional GB.[22]

 Wells (1982) refers to "mainstream RP" and "U-RP"; he suggests that

Gimson's categories of Conservative and Advanced RP referred to the U-RP
of the old and young respectively. However, Wells stated, "It is difficult to
separate stereotype from reality" with U-RP.[27] Writing on his blog in
February 2013, Wells wrote, "If only a very small percentage of English
people speak RP, as Trudgill et al. claim, then the percentage speaking U-RP
is vanishingly small" and "If I were redoing it today, I think I'd drop all
mention of 'U-RP'".[28]
  Upton distinguishes between RP (which he equates with Wells's
"mainstream RP"), Traditional RP (after Ramsaran 1990), and an even older
version which he identifies with Cruttenden's "Refined RP".[29]
 An article on the website of the British Library refers to Conservative,
Mainstream and Contemporary RP.[30]

/There’s more than one RP

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.

https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/received-pronunciation

This recording is an example of a Received Pronunciation accent.

Lady Silvia speaks with a very distinctive accent, which sounds rather old-fashioned. It
has features we still hear among older RP speakers, perhaps particularly in the upper
classes and aristocracy, and so we have chosen to categorise it conservative RP. This
is characterised by a number of very traditional pronunciations no longer widely used
among younger RP speakers.

Typical of conservative RP

Listen to the way Lady Silvia uses a <v> sound for the medial consonant in nephew,
where most of us tend to use a <f> sound. The <v> is the traditional pronunciation of the
word for speakers of all accents, but is now rarely heard among younger speakers.
Listen also to the way she pronounces during and dunes in the statements one had to
make conversation to one's elderly neighbour during six courses and the
sand dunes have gone further and further towards the sea. Like many older speakers,
she pronounces a <y> sound between the initial consonant and vowel of a word
like tune or dune – so that they sound something like 'tyoon' and 'dyoon'. Younger
speakers are far more likely to blend the consonant and <y> sounds into a <ch> and <j>
sound respectively. So the word tune might sound like 'choon' and the word dune might
be pronounced identically to the word June.

Conservative RP vowels

These are both subtle changes of pronunciation that are common to speakers of most
British English accents. There are, however, a number of vowel sounds used by Lady
Silvia that are typical only of conservative RP. Listen, for instance, to the vowel sounds
she uses for words in the following two sets:

1. married, Grand Tour, man, had, agriculture, grandmother, grandfather,

Hampshire, chapel, pantry boy, nannies, understand, grandpa, jam, exactly, Mr
Patterson, grand, adequate, tank trap, that and sand dunes
2. history, Miss Wheatley, property, eventually, Italy, thirty, only, sorry, nursery,
Tony, baby, nineteen-twenty, pantry boy, invariably, exactly, usually and lovely

In the first set, she uses a vowel sound halfway between an <e> sound and an <a>
sound. The phonetic symbol for this is /æ/. Younger RP speakers generally use an <a>
sound, a rare example of RP speech moving closer to northern English pronunciation.
Many accents in South East England, particularly in London, retain the older <æ>
sound, while speakers in the north have been using an <a> sound for some time. Her
pronunciation of words in the second set – nouns and adjectives ending with the suffix
<y> – is, on the other hand, an example of an older pronunciation retained in many
northern accents, but changed in RP and in most accents in the South and Midlands of
England. Here, older RP speakers and many speakers in the north use a vowel sound
similar to the <i> sound in bit, while younger RP speakers use a very brief version of the
<ee> sound in beat.

Two distinctive features

Lady Silvia uses two distinctive features associated with conservative RP. Listen to the
way she pronounces the <r> sound between vowels in words such
as married, inherited, grandparents, corridors, invariably and during. Unlike most
consonants in English, the pronunciation of <r> can vary quite dramatically. The most
common pronunciation involves producing a continuous sound with the tip of the tongue
raised to the roof of the mouth and the sides of the tongue curled upwards and inwards.
Here, however, Lady Silvia uses a tapped 'r' – a sound produced by flicking (tapping)
the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth - thus making only very brief and
rapid contact.
Listen also to the vowel sound she uses in lost and gone. She
rhymes lost with exhaust and gone with dawn, where most speakers would pronounce
them to rhyme with glossed and don respectively. Lady Silvia's pronunciation, which
would include words like off, cloth and Australia, is a fascinating example of a vowel
change that took place in an earlier period, but did not establish itself completely and
has ultimately been reversed. Speakers in the seventeenth century began to use it, but
it did not spread into many regional accents and thus after only 300 years the original
pronunciation has been restored – at least in RP. Interestingly, many speakers in
Ireland and parts of the South East of England still use a pronunciation based on the
17th-century innovation.

About the speaker

Lady Silvia Holcombe (1909–2005; female; housewife)