Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the prestige accent of British English historically associated with the south-east of England, private boarding schools, the older universities, and twentieth-century BBC broadcasting. The term was popularised by Daniel Jones in the early editions of his English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), drawing on a nineteenth-century use of received meaning "generally accepted in polite society."
Defining features
RP is non-rhotic: /r/ is pronounced only before a vowel (car [kɑː], carry [ˈkæri]). It distinguishes the TRAP and BATH lexical sets, with /æ/ in cat and /ɑː/ in bath, path, dance. It maintains a STRUT vowel /ʌ/ distinct from FOOT /ʊ/, and uses a FORCE/NORTH merged /ɔː/. Wells (1982) describes its consonants as conservative — clear /l/ before vowels, dark [ɫ] in coda — and its vowels as the system most ELT materials and dictionaries adopt as the British target.
Decline and successors
By the late twentieth century RP had ceased to be the default broadcasting accent and was increasingly perceived as socially marked. Linguists now more commonly use Standard Southern British English (SSBE) or General British (GB) to describe the contemporary educated southern accent, which retains most RP features but admits innovations: yod-coalescence in Tuesday [ˈtʃuːzdeɪ], a fronter GOOSE vowel, occasional t-glottalling, and increased influence from Estuary English. Cruttenden (2014) discusses these shifts under the label "General British."
Status in ELT
Despite its declining demographic base, RP — or its modernised SSBE variant — remains the dominant pronunciation model in British ELT publishing, exam speaking criteria, and most learner dictionaries. Where the Lingua Franca Core argues for prioritising intelligibility over accent imitation, mainstream British materials still present an RP-derived inventory as the reference system, paired with General American in dual-transcription dictionaries.
References
- Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge University Press.
- Cruttenden, A. (2014). Gimson's Pronunciation of English (8th ed.). Routledge.
- Roach, P. (2009). English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.