RP revisited

Varieties of RP

In the first volume we took RP as something given, as something which – at least for British-oriented readers – is thoroughly familiar. RP is, after all, what anyone living in the United Kingdom hears constantly from radio and television announcers and newsreaders and from many other public figures. Everyone in Britain has a mental image of RP, even though they may not refer to it by that name and even though the image may not be very accurate. Many English people are also regularly exposed to RP in personal face-to-face contact. For a small minority, it is their own speech.

Yet no accent is a homogeneous invariant monolith – certainly not RP. So we must now proceed to consider the variability found within it. In doing so we are forced to be impressionistic: although RP is by far the most thoroughly described accent of English, there has been very little in the way of objective quantified investigation of its variability.

It is convenient to recognize first of all a central tendency which I shall call mainstream RP. We can define it negatively, by recognizing two other tendencies or types of RP, which are part of RP as a whole but distinct from mainstream RP. One is U-RP (4.1.2 below), the other adoptive RP (4.1.3 below). It is also convenient to recognize a rather vaguer entity, Near-RP, comprising accents which are not exactly RP though not very different from it.