What is bbc English?

RP is closely associated with broadcasting in general, and the BBC in particular. It is widely believed - even if it isn't true - that the BBC traditionally employed as newsreaders and broadcasters only people who could speak RP. If you ask people to think of a person who might speak with a traditional RP accent, they'll often think of an old-fashioned BBC announcer, addressing the nation on the Home Service.

If the phrase 'BBC English' were taken literally, it would just mean English as spoken on the BBC - which today would mean virtually every kind of English from all around the world. But this is not what it means at all.

'BBC English' is a popular term for a particular acrolect - that is, a prestigious form of speech. Other, similar terms include 'Oxford English', 'the Queen's English', 'Standard English' and, of course, RP. Haran Rasalingam, posting on the Voices site, argues that "public school dialects, educated dialects and BBC dialects are dialects of status and power which is why people feel they should try to speak more like that rather than their own native dialect."

Is there such a thing as bbc English?

The BBC doesn't require any of its broadcasters to speak with any particular accent. It could be argued that, even in those early years before the Second World War, the fact that the announcers and newsreaders heard on the BBC spoke RP was a by-product of the restricted social group from which BBC employees was drawn, rather than a matter of deliberate policy.

Nevertheless, the term 'BBC English' entered the language and is still widely used, even though - as we can see from the comments above - a range of accents are used on the BBC. The term is even being used by linguists. This maybe because, as we have seen, RP is a loaded and problematic term which conjures up many problems and prejudices. So some linguists now follow popular usage by relabelling what they used to call RP as 'BBC English' and, in some pronunciation dictionaries, the accent represented is now called 'BBC English' instead of RP.

There's a problem with this approach, though. If you call the accent normally used in BBC news broadcasts 'BBC English', and use that as an example of RP, then the people whom the BBC employs as news broadcasters are therefore RP speakers by definition. This circularity of defining 'BBC English' in relation to RP, and RP in relation to the BBC makes 'BBC English' meaningless as a concept. Ironically, this is happening just as the relationship between RP and so-called 'BBC English' might more logically be viewed as a thing of the past.

Prestige dialect

A prestige dialect is the dialect spoken by the most prestigious people in a speech community which is large enough to sustain more than one dialect.

Social prestige and the role of language

The most prestigious people are those with the greatest influence on the community. This influence may derive from economic, political, or social power. There may be a tendency to align one's own use of language (idiolect) to that of a favoured dialect (positive prestige), or to move away from a dialect of low esteem (negative prestige). Studies, particularly by Labov, have shown that positive prestige is more often overt, while negative prestige is more often covert (avoidance of the unmentionable). Sociologically, women of the lower middle-class are more likely to notice and adopt overt positive prestige. Among working-class men, there may sometimes be a covert preference for negative prestige.

In nations with a colonial history the prestige dialect is often close to the prestige dialect of the colonising community although it may fossilise at the point of succession.

Where creolisation has taken place, the superstrate language operates as an extreme prestige dialect, which may effect great influence, including, in extreme case, the decreolisation of the creole language into the prestige language. An acrolect may be more prestigious than a basilect.

When a prestige dialect is prescribed as the norm by dominant institutions it is also a standard dialect. Broadcast media have been particularly effective at defining standard dialects.