Articles About the RP

Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation?
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/rphappened.htm
Article written by John Wells, professor of the University College London, claiming that even BBC is now thinking of abandoning the old Received Pronunciation, because nowadays it sounds old fashioned. It presents three ways of defining the RP: the sociolinguistic criteria, the ideal criteria and the third criteria is related to the teaching of EFL. It shows 15 ways in which the RP has changed over the years and 7 words that now have new shapes.

Differences in pronunciation between American English and Received Pronunciation
http://www.uta.fi/~sanni.siurua/ame1.html
This is a paper written by a student of the University of Tampere, in which it is compared the RP English with Standard American English (AE). Firstly, it states that while RP is an accent, the AE is a norm of English. It includes differences in word stress and in articulation of single phonemes within words, with many examples to illustrate the differences.

RIP RP
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1081717.stm
This is an article from BBC News that talks about the end of RP. It claims that the Queen’s pronunciation is not the same because she is being coherent with her times, becoming more informal, or even lazier. It explains that the sounds of RP are like exercises to the muscles of the tongue and mouth and that the use of it may cause some pain to those muscles. It also says that usually the RP vowels are the ones taught to the foreigners learners of English even though they are not aware that it sounds “posh”.

Examples of RP

The following are videos which explicit the RP Pronunciation. It is interesting to notice the differences between the older ones and the most recent ones, because as any variation of a language, the RP also changes through time.


This is an educative video from the fifities, about the London Bus Service.


Another video from the fifities, this one seems to be a news broadcast.


An extrat from BBC News about the poor grammar of young English people.


Video with examples of voiceover services of a British lady.


An extract from the movie "My Fair Lady", in which Audrey Hepburn's character tries to speak with RP.