Historical variation

Like all accents, RP has changed over time. For example, sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was standard to pronounce the /æ/ sound, as in land, with a vowel close to [ɛ], so that land would sound similar to lend. RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English, but recordings show that even the Queen has changed her pronunciation over the past 50 years, no longer using an [ɛ]-like vowel in words like land.^[17]

Before World War II, the vowel of cup was a back vowel close to cardinal [ʌ] but has since shifted forward to a central position so that [ɐ] is more accurate; phonetic transcription of this vowel as <ʌ> is common partly for historical reasons.^[18]

Some old-fashioned forms of RP, still occasionally heard from older speakers, have other variations in their phonology including words like off, cloth, gone being pronounced with /ɔː/ instead of /ɒ/ (See lot-cloth split) and a distinction between horse and hoarse with an extra diphthong /ɔə/ appearing in words like hoarse, force, and pour.

The change in RP may even be observed in the home of "BBC English". The BBC accent from the 1950s was distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is instantly recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is often used for comic effect in TV or radio programmes wishing to satirize outdated social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr Cholmondley-Warner" sketches.^{[citation needed]}

Comparison to other varieties

• Unlike most forms of English English and American English, RP is a broad A accent, so words like bath and chance appear with /ɑː/ and not /æ/.

• RP is a non-rhotic accent, meaning /r/ does not occur unless followed immediately by a vowel.

• Like other accents of southern England, RP has undergone the wine-whine merger so the phoneme /ʍ/ is not present except among those who have acquired this distinction as the result of speech training. R.A.D.A. (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), based in London, still teaches these two sounds as distinct phonemes.

• Unlike many other varieties of English English, there is no h-dropping in words like head or herb.

• RP does not have yod dropping after /n/, /t/ and /d/. Hence, for example, new, tune and dune are pronounced /njuː/, /tjuːn/ and /djuːn/ rather than /nuː/, /tuːn/ and /duːn/. This contrasts with many East Anglian and East Midland varieties of English English and with many forms of American English.

• The flapped variant of /t/ and /d/ (as in much of the West Country and the Cape Coloured dialect of South Africa) is not used. In traditional RP [ɾ] is an allophone of /r/ (used only intervocalically).

Received Pronunciation and BBC English

What is Received Pronunciation?

"Although the BBC does not, and never did, impose pronunciations of its own on English words, the myth of BBC English dies hard. It owed its birth no doubt to the era before the Second World War, when all announcers ... spoke ... Received Pronunciation."²

Received Pronunciation, often abbreviated to RP, is an accent of spoken English. Unlike other UK accents, it's identified not so much with a particular region as with a particular social group, although it has connections with the accent of Southern England. RP is associated with educated speakers and formal speech. It has connotations of prestige and authority, but also of privilege and arrogance. Some people even think that the name 'Received Pronunciation' is a problem - if only some accents or pronunciations are 'received', then the implication is that others should be rejected or refused.

When writing his pronouncing dictionary in 1916, phonetician Daniel Jones described RP as the accent "most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding schools". Although this description would raise a few eyebrows today, RP is still the accent generally represented in dictionaries which give pronunciations, and it's also used as a model for the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Perhaps for this reason, RP is often thought of as an unchanging accent; a standard against which other accents can be measured or judged. Some people don't even think of it as an accent at all, but rather a way of speaking without an accent. Speaking without an accent, though, would be like painting without a colour! In fact, there is considerable variation within groups of people who are said to speak RP, the term is differently interpreted by different people, and RP itself has changed considerably over time.