How many kinds of received pronunciation

Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Nordquist, Richard. Received Pronunciation. General American English Accent and Dialect.

English Language: History, Definition, and Examples. Definition and Examples of English Pronunciation.

Definition of Accent in English Speech. Key Events in the History of the English Language. What Is a Syllable in the English Language? This name implies that this is the English accent that the Queen has, and by association, others in the upper and aristocratic classes.

In fact, the Queen speaks with quite a different accent from RP. So to use this term as a synonym is not only classist, but also inaccurate.

In the 20th century, it was common on the BBC the British Broadcasting Corporation that speakers would all speak with approximately the same standardized accent. This means that again this term is an inaccurate descriptor of the accent in question. Its geographical specificity, though, makes it a good competitor with RP as the most useful terms to describe our reference accent. RP and all its associated features still exist — and there are many speakers who still have this accent — but those features together are now considered pretty old-fashioned.

This term has both the geographical specificity of Estuary English, without the associated stigma, as well as the generality of General British. With this term, we can encompass speakers from the entire area of Southeast England spanning between Oxford, Southampton, Canterbury and Cambridge, as well as London.

For many learners of English, standard British English is synonymous with one of the three. It is widely recognised and often used as a model for teaching English as a second language, as well as serving as the basis for pronunciation guides of British English in dictionaries.

We look at Received Pronunciation — the characteristically British accent. There are actually three varieties of RP: Contemporary , Mainstream and Conservative RP , the last of which is very traditional indeed — the kind you might hear in old black and white films or by the upper classes in Downton Abbey. These days it is associated with the aristocracy and for many people has connotations of privilege and snobbery. Mainstream RP is a kind of neutral accent that gives no clues as to where in the UK the speaker is from, while Contemporary RP is spoken by younger people.

Received Pronunciation has a fairly short history as an accent.