Received Pronunciation

• RP is a social accent rather than a regional accent and it means an 'accepted' or 'approved' pronunciation of language.
• RP is sometimes considered to be a standard accent of British English, even though it is estimated only around 2% of Britons speak it today (this is constantly changing).
• RP is associated with the upper classes, upper-middle classes, professionals etc.
• RP is usually regarded as the most prestigious of British English accents, within the UK and around the world.
• RP has a negligible presence in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as a falling number of speakers in Wales (divergence).
• RP is also a theoretical linguistic concept. It is the accent on which the IPA and phonemic transcriptions in dictionaries are based.
• RP is widely used around the world for teaching English as a foreign language, as well as American English.
• It didn't take long for RP to be held as the prestigious accent of the royal court and of aspirational London professionals.
• RP as a marker of social prestige led to diglossia in London and the surrounding area.
• Oxford and Cambridge, as the great seats of learning, also adopted RP, spreading the accent among the wealthy educated elite.
• By the 19th Century, RP had become the accent of the public schools throughout England, such as Winchester.
• The term Received Pronunciation appears to have been coined by linguist A J Ellis in 1869, and popularised by Daniel Jones in the 1920s.
• Lord Reith, the first General Manager of the BBC adopted it in 1922 as a radio broadcasting standard, hence the origins of the term BBC English.
• In 1932, the BBC began broadcasting in English overseas, using the RP accent, spreading the accent globally.
• RP, like all accents, continues to change, impacted upon by social context. The various terms of RP can be roughly divided into three categories: conservative, mainstream and contemporary.
• Conservative RP refers to a very traditional variety particularly associated with older speakers and the aristocracy.
• Mainstream RP describes an accent that we might consider extremely neutral in terms of signals regarding age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker.
• Contemporary RP refers to speakers using features typical of younger RP speakers.
• Estuary English is a type of accent identified as spreading outwards from London and containing features of both RP and London speech.