The Received Pronunciation (1830s- ), or RP, was the accent or way of saying words of the top people in Britain for most of the 1800s and 1900s. It is what Americans mean when they say someone has a “British accent” and what people in Britain mean when they say someone has a “posh” accent or “no accent”. It is an accent that is readily understood everywhere in the English-speaking world.
Those who use RP, among others:
- Actors: Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, David Niven, John Cleese, Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard), etc,
- The BBC from the 1920s to the 1970s,
- Top schools and universities, like Oxford and Cambridge,
- Tory MPs.
Patrick Stewart’s accent is not native but part of his theatre training.
About 2 million people in Britain speak RP. For them it is the natural way of speaking. For many who learned English as a foreign language it is the right way to say words, the way you see in British dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary.
RP was the voice of power and authority in the 1930s, but by the 1990s it had become the voice of the stuck-up.
Tony Blair, for example, still spoke RP in the 1980s but by the 1990s he was speaking in Estuary English, an everyman’s London English which is halfway between RP and working-class Cockney.
RP was never the accent of the masses. That was kind of the idea. But for most of the 1900s it was how the top people in all parts of the country spoke. It was how you learned to speak if you went to the top schools and universities, like Eton, Oxford and Cambridge. Eton was said to have the purest RP accent.
RP only tells people that you have a very good education, but not where you are from. You cannot even say an RP speaker is from Britain since most are from overseas.
There was no RP in the 1700s. We know that from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. There was not even a single accent among the rich and powerful back then. That arose in the 1800s with the rise of English public schools (meaning the private schools of the rich).
Lord Reith based BBC English on RP. He saw it as the right way of speaking and wanted the BBC to set an example. It was also the accent that everyone, rich or poor, north or south, native or foreign, understood. That was true before the BBC, but the BBC made it even more true.
You can still hear RP on the BBC, especially on the news, but it started to move away from it in the 1970s.
RP has changed over time. We know that from hearing the old news broadcasts of the BBC. You can also hear it in Angelina Jolie’s character in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004), who speaks in an RP from the 1930s. So RP is not some timeless accent. It changes like everything else.
See also:
Angelina sounds quite nice there! John Cleese was very funny, especially in ‘A Fish called Wanda’
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I have always heard Wanda was good but I have never seen it!
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British teachers certainly dont speak ‘RP’ LOL
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Thanks for this very helpful article. I would love to hear more ideas on, how one can go about adopting RP.
Being a foreign student in the UK, not having a purely British accent has had a major negative effect on me, and I am very interested in working on the issue. So any ideas on how one can train himself in RP would be of great help.
Cheers
Dave
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As far as I know the best way to learn RP if you are not native to it is to take one of those courses that actors do.
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I’m a foreigner student who want to make an essay about Rp. I would like to know if there is some tv series or actors who have gradually changed their way of speaking, so to analyse them. Thank you very much
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@Olly
I know this reply is a year late but have you heard of a tv series called ‘Keeping Up Appearances?’. It’s a British comedy in which the lead female character, Hyacinth Buckett, speaks in RP, but she has deliberately developed a posh accent so she cans escape from her Northern working class roots and her embarrassing common relatives lol! Check it out, it is THE perfect example of Received pronunciation and funny too.
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George Bernard Shaw, playwright and Fabian Socialist, saw RP as the ticket to the eradication of the British social class system. His premise, to over simplify, was that if everyone spoke RP, there could be no class distinction. This is predicated on class distinction being based on accent. His play Pygmalion was based on it. Pygmalion was later made into the movie My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison – two users of RP.
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@ Bulanik
Excellent comment. Thanks. I never got the difference between “posh” and RP.
Who are good examples of RP speakers, both white and not, especially those whom Americans might know?
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How far off do you think Piers Morgan is from RP?
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Piers Morgan, yes.
Thandie Newton:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfqZNQd92MU)
Archie Panjabi:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnPByq1ptuY)
There are others, but I’ve simply no idea how how well known they are by Americans.
Neither of these English examples would be considered “posh”.
Neither speak with “plummy” accents (characterised by speaking as though they had plums in their mouths, whilst keeping their lips as still as possible).
Both Adrian and Thandie would be considered well-spoken with South of England accents.
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Hugh Grant sounds like he’s slowly losing his English accent.
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RP accent is really wonderful.
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