Контрольная работа: RP/BBC English or British English as a standard language

7. Chief differences between RP and regional accents of British English

Chapter 1. RP/BBC English as the British national standard of pronunciation

1.1 Socio-historical survey of RP/BBC English

Gimson claims that the historical origins of RP go back tothe 16^th -17^th centuryrecommendations that the speech model should be that provided by the educated pronunciation of the court and the capital [Gimson 1980]. Thus, the roots of RPin London, more particularly the pronunciation of the London region and the Home countries lying around London within 60 miles: Middlesex, Essex, Kent, Surrey.By the 18^th centurya prestigious pronunciation model was characterized as the speech " received by the polite circles of society " [Gimson: 1977].

By the 19^th century London English had increasingly acquired social prestige losing be of its local characteristics. It was finally fixed as the pronunciation of the ruling class. According to Leither, in the mid 19^th century there was an increase in education, in particular, there occurred the rise of public schools (since 1864 Public School Act). These schools became importantagencies in the transmission of Southern English as the form with highest prestige. Since thattime London English or Southern English was termed as Classroom English, Public School English or Educated English [Liether: 1982].That was a forceful normalization movement towards the establishment of Educated Southern English as the standard accent. The major reasons for this were:

1) The need for a clearly defined and recognized norm for public and other purposes;

2) The desire to provide adequate descriptions for teaching English both as the mother tongue and a foreign language.

Professor Daniel Jones described this variety as a hoped-for standard pronunciation in the first editions of his books "The Pronunciation of English" [1909] and "Outline of English Phonetics"[1917]. By 1930, however, any intention of setting up a standard of Spoken English was disclaimed by many phoneticians. The term "Standard Pronunciation" was replaced by "Received Pronunciation", which had been introduced for Southern Educated English by phonetician Ida Ward who defined it as pronunciation which " had lost all easily noticeable local differences" [Leitner: 1982].According to Wells the British Broadcasting Corporation(the BBC) adopted RP for the use by its news-readers since 1920s. The country's population, for more than half a century, had been exposed through broadcasting to RP. Until the early 70s of the last century it was the only accent demanded in the BBC's announcers. For that reason RP often became identified in the public mind with BBC English. Only over the last 30 years, both the BBC and other British national radio and TV channels have been increasingly tolerant of the accent of their broadcasters. [Wells: 1982].

1.2 Phonological and phonetic dimensions of RP/BBC English

Now we will outline main segmental features of RP/BBC English.

As for its phoneme inventory, Gimson states, that this accent has 20 vowels and 24 consonants. The system of vowels embraces 12 pure vowels or monophthongs: i:, i, æ,Λ,a:, o, o:, υ, u:, з:, әand 8 diphthongs: ei, ai, oi, әυ, aυ, iә, eә, υә. The system of RP consonants consists of the following two wide categories of sounds:

1) those typically associated with a noisecomponent: p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ,з, h, tʃ,dз;

2) those without a noise componentwhich may share many phonetic characteristics with vowels - 7 sonorants: m, n, ŋ, 1, r, j, w.

Measurements of text frequency of occurrence of RP vowels and consonants display the following picture: [Gimson: 2001]

According to the phonotactic specification of /r/occurrence, RP is a non-rhotic or r-lessaccent, i.e. /r/does not occur after a vowel or at the end of the words. Itmay be claimed that /r/ in RP has a limited distribution, beingrestrictedin its occurrence to pre-vocalic positions.

Prof. J C. Wells in his article "Cockneyfication of RP" discusses several of recent and current sound changes in RP. He considers in turn:

1) the decline of weak /I/,

2) glottalling,

A lot of bright examples of glottalling we can find in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” ( film “My Fair Lady”):

e.g. So cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor girl. / e.g. What’s that? That ain’t proper writing. /e.g. Buy a flower, kind gentleman. /

3) 1-vocalization,

4) intrusive /r/,

5) yod coalescence,

e.g. Then what did you take my words for? / e.g. Now you know, don’t you? I’m come to have lessons, I am. / e.g. Would you mind if I take a seat? /

6) assorted lexical changes.

V. Parashchuk claims that there is a tendency towards the so-called smoothing (tightening, reduction) of the sequences / aiə /, /aυә/ ("thripthongs"), the medial element of which may be elided. They are sometimes reduced to a long open vowel, e.g. power /pa:/, tower / ta:/, fire / fa:/, our /a:/. Though the full forms have been retained in the latest edition of the LPD as the main variants, their reduced counterparts are very common in casual RP: /aυә - aә - a:/.

There is a tendency, though not a very consistent one, to make the diphthong /υә/ a positional allophone of /o:/ . It is increasingly replaced by /o:/ , e.g. the most common form of sure has /o:/ with a similar drift being true for poor, mour, tour and their derivatives. Rare words, such as gourd, dour tend to retain /υә/without a common /o:/ variant. Words in which /υә/ is preceded by a consonant plus /j/are relatively resistant to this shift, e.g. pure, curious, fury, furious.

There is a yod-dropping tendencyafter /s/in the words like suit, super and their derivatives, e.g. suitcase, suitable, supreme, superior, supermarket - these have the dominant form without /j/.In words, where /j/ occurs after the consonants other than /s/, it still remains the dominant form in RP, e.g. enthusiasm, news, student. [Parashchuk: 2005]

Chapter 2. British English as a standard of pronunciation in Great Britain