Whenever someone who isn’t from the UK is asked to put on an ‘British accent’, they usually default to a well-to-do South-Eastern impression. But its actual name is Received Pronunciation, or RP for short; it is also referred to as the Queen’s English, Oxford English, and BBC English (for reasons I’ll explain later) and is most often heard in the middle and upper classes in England.
Within the UK there are many different accents, and many different dialects (close to forty). A dialect is a particular form of a language that is related to a specific region or group, and different from the standard language in three ways: lexis (vocabulary), grammar (structure) and phonology (pronunciation or accent). Geordie is an example of an English dialect, as it has localised vocabulary as well as regional grammar constructions that differ from Standard English. However, RP is an accent, not a dialect, as most RP speakers use Standard English.
RP is also a linguistic concept. It is the accent on which phonetic transcriptions in dictionaries are based, and it is widely used for teaching English as a foreign language (along with General American). While RP is probably the most widely studied and recognised variety of spoken English in the world, recent estimates suggest that only three percent of the UK population speak it. It isn’t really heard in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and it is losing its status in Wales, so it could be argued that it should better be described as an English accent, rather than a British one.
However, even though it may have emerged from the South-East Midlands, RP is regionally non-specific – unlike many other accents found in the UK. The Liverpudlian accent, for example, is easily recognisable as being from Liverpool. On the other hand, RP doesn’t give you any clue about a speaker’s geographic background. Nevertheless, it can reveal part of their social and educational upbringing.
The RP accent is based loosely on the local accents of the South-East (roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge) and can be traced back to the public schools and universities of Britain in the 19th Century. Daniel Jones originally used the term Public School Pronunciation in the 1920s to describe this new and socially exclusive accent. Over the following century, increasing numbers of the privileged social classes were sent to boarding schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and went on to attend universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, influencing their speech patterns. This caused RP to be associated with ‘the Establishment’. The term RP was coined in 1869 by A J Ellis, but only became widely used to describe the accent of the social elite after Jones adopted it for the second edition of ‘English Pronunciation Dictionary’ (1924).
Even though RP is a mark of the higher classes, there are still different forms that mark out a speaker’s age and education. These forms can be roughly divided into three categories: conservative RP refers to a very traditional variety, particularly associated with older speakers and the aristocracy (the Queen’s English); mainstream RP is a very neutral accent, lacing any distinctive markers of age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker, and contemporary RP refers to features typical of younger RP speakers. But they are all connected by the fact that they don’t use any regional pronunciation patterns. A debatable fourth category here is Estuary English, which is a blend of mainstream RP and the South London accent, and therefore isn’t strictly RP.
RP saw its biggest advertisement when it was selected in 1922 by the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English as the broadcasting standard, where the term ‘BBC English’ emerged. This choice was made as it was believed that RP would be the most widely understood variety of English, both in the UK and oversees. It was also chosen because, by choosing a regional accent, the BBC ran the risk of alienating some listeners. However, since RP is a product of the upper classes and expensive schools, it represented a very small social minority within the UK and likely contributed to some of the negative perception of regional varieties of English. This policy continued until 1989, when it was decided they would use a larger range of regional accents in broadcasting, which continues today.
