Characteristics of Received Pronunciation

Alfonso Garca Polo

Group 23 UCJC

Subject Phonetic

Characteristics of Received Pronunciation Accent is a characteristic of speech that can tell us much information about the speaker (the age, gender and education level, wealth, social class, emotional attachment to their job, home town or political party). Essentially, RP is based on a sixteenth-century, upper-class London accent and Some of its prominent characteristics are clipped consonants and elongated vowels. Main characteristic RP is defined as non-regional, and thus, in its ideal form, does not tolerate regional variation. Received Pronunciation RP was codified by Daniel Jones in his 1917 English Pronouncing Dictionary and is the accent most commonly associated with the British upper crust. Jones was considerated the father of the RP, he was born in 1881 in central London into an oasis of calm, secluded privilege. Educated in the upper-middle-class, fee-paying public school system Jones eventually received a B.A. from Cambridge and went on to study in France under Paul Passy: the originator of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In 1912, Jones wrotePhonetic Readings in English, which claimed to be a text designed for those foreign learners wishing to learn the correct pronunciation of the English language.

In 1920s or 1930s the appropriate voice of BBC radio was only RP, several decades later many people started to perceive this accent as being too posh (actually, speaking posh is now a well-known expression meaning simply speaking RP. In 1970s, many middle-class people started to perceive regional accents to be more attractive than Received Pronunciation. Conservative RP is by now very rarely used (mostly during comic situations or historical archive material) and advanced RP has been heard much more often, for example in Television or Radio. As pusblished by Guardian on 27th January 1994, the British Broadcasting Corporation decided that the cut-glass accent of home countries Britain is to be banished from the air waves by the BBC in favour of more energetic and vigorous voices from the regions () Parts of the BBC were lagging a little behind the sound of the nation, beginning to sound a bit antique. From that moment changed more quickly noticed as RP and its consequences at the Britain people.PAGE 1