Re: "Upper Class" & "Non-Upper Class" English + "Received Pronunciation"

"Berkeley Brett" <RoyalOui@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:70893898-ed79-46fb-82e7-6e34ad19d564@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_pronunciation

From the article:

Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English
language which has been long perceived as uniquely prestigious amongst
British accents....

... Received Pronunciation may be referred to as the Queen's (or
King's) English, on the grounds that it is spoken by the monarch. It
is also sometimes referred to as BBC English, because it was
traditionally used by the BBC, yet nowadays these notions are slightly
misleading. Queen Elizabeth II uses one specific form of English,
whilst BBC presenters and staff are no longer bound by one type of
accent, nor is "Oxbridge" (the universities of Oxford and Cambridge).

The mention of the BBC is fundamental, if elliptical here.
Essential points include:
1. The BBC had from approx. 1930 a monopoly of radio
broadcasting at just the period in history when radio
receivers became cheap enough for everyone to afford.
2. Since its foundation, the BBC maintained a committee
on pronunciation, that set speech norms compulsory for all
announce staff. The only voices allowed to depart from
BBC standard pronunciation were dialect comedians,
characters in plays etc. The pronunciation committee tended
to enforce the speech style of the educated middle class
or sub-aristocratic upper class, conveniently labeled a
"public school accent." (This alludes to the top tier of
education, fee-charging schools, attended by less than
10 per cent of the population, which nevertheless accounted
for most of the educated professions, higher bureaucracy etc.)
The public school accent was a late Victorian or early 20C
innovation, that effectively attenuated or suppressed rural and
regional accents.

2b. As BBC radio became popular, it too tended to attenuate
or suppresss regional and lower class accents. It made
available to everyone models of how the ambitious ought to
speak, if they wanted better jobs than their parents had.
Secondly it was influential through housewives and mothers
who liked having the radio play all day long. These were
the first teachers of language in families of all social classes.
In the long run, BBC English encouraged housewives to
adopt BBC speech, and provided the accent and grammar
they taught to their children.

3. Reflecting social changes (diminishing social class
discrimination since 1945 or 1940) the BBC changed its
policy in the 1960s and put on the air announcers who
spoke with regional accents (e.g. Welsh or Yorkshire)
and even immigrants' accents (from the West Indies or
India.) Broadcasting (TV as well as radio) were also
opened up to competition in the 1960s when commercial
television established itself in the audience market. When
first on the air, private TV modeled itself on the BBC as
the only precursor and model. As competition became
sharper, private TV and radio sought to emphasize their
difference from the BBC (as stuffy and snobbish) by
emphasizing either proletarian or working class voices.
Fearful of declining audience share, BBC Radio was
totally reorganized in 1967 hoping to become more
"appealing." This also meant BBC voices had to be
more demotic and less typical of the stereotypical
ruling class. (The rightness or wrongness of the
stereotypical BBC accent or presumed social attitude
was by this date irrelevant.)

4. Teachers since the 1960s have defined their
professional purposes differently from their historic
predecessors. The idea of educating children so
that they could "better themselves" by rising in the
social pyramid was impeached by the newly dominant
idea of social equality regardless of parental origins,
family wealth, and so on. Refusal to accept rule by
any particular social class meant that RP could no
longer be taught as a tool of personal careerism.
It had become more important to teach children to
be proud of themselves than to change their family
speech.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)


.

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