Mobility, contact and an accent norm: the case of Received Pronunciation

1
Mobility, contact and an accent norm the case of
Received Pronunciation

• Anne Fabricius
• Roskilde University
• April 2004

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Structure of the paper

• First part
• a renewed sociolinguistics of RP
• a renewed social class analysis
• Second part
• changing forms of native RP
• changing norms of construct RP

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A renewed sociolinguistics

• Construct RP (norms) versus native RP (forms)
• the systematic ambiguity?
• RP the domain of phoneticians? Not a vernacular?
• RP speakers not suitable as subjects?
• BUT Forms and norms change at different speeds
  need to separate cRP and nRP

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One example of norms

• thats the thing, it is, singing in a choir is a
  very standardising thing and and in the case of X
  (college) its standardising to some vague
  notion of RP of fifty years ago I think, which
  is no doubt what our world service listeners want
  to hear, who knows (Male speaker recorded in
  Cambridge in 1997)

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J. Milroy 2001

• Received pronunciation who receives it and how
  long will it be received
• phonetic forms still exist
• Social situation no longer the same as RPs
  heyday
• RP still exists but does not exist a paradox
• Need two separate entities

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Do social elites persist in the UK?

• Cultural distinctions and nuances remain legion.
  Accents, houses, cars, schools, sports, food,
  fashion, drink, smoking, supermarkets, soap
  operas, holiday destinations, even training
  shoes virtually everything in life is graded
  with subtle or unsubtle class tags attachedAnd
  underpinning these distinctions are fundamental
  differences in upbringing, education and
  occupations.
• (Adonis and Pollard 199710)

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The classless society

• a clever ruse to discredit the notion of class
  divisions without actually denying their
  existence The classless society is therefore not
  a society without classes, but a meritocratic
  society providing means for people to advance by
  ability regardless of class origins.
• (Adonis and Pollard 199714-15)
• Educational segregation in the independent sector
  in UK from pre-school age

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Admissions to Cambridge
9
Savage 2000Class Analysis and Social
transformation

• Economic inequality continues to segregate
  through education, plus
• Class cultures have been transformed loss of
  working class independence
• New middle class modes of individualization come
  to the fore
• Horizontal versus vertical dimension emphasized,
  discourse of career
• the classless society/ the classless accent

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Is RP regionalising? T-glottalling localised
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Construct RP at the micro-level 1

• I um did your mother and father ever talk about
  um the way that you spoke as a
  child
• R yes not so much me as the other two younger
  siblings cause the other two used to glottally
  stop all the time so theyd go whawQ? and my
  motherd go what wQt? like this

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Construct RP at the micro-level 2

• R theres sort of a slight backlash going on at
  the moment, my mother says yer she says hes
  twenty-three years j3z old and its like "No,
  mother, year" jI???
• I so youre correcting her
• R trying to sort of slightly bring this back
  down to not quite so much like 50s BBC
  television presenters ()

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Attitudes to RP

• Dialect in discourse attitude study
• York 2002
• 3 secondary schools
• Samples male/female, RP/regional, qualitative and
  quantitative data
• Results female RP speaker judged more positively
  than male RP speaker

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Conclusions

• Fruitful to split RP into native and construct RP
• Looking at a social groups changing accent forms
  via language variation and change paradigm
• And changing norms expressed in conscious and
  near-conscious attitudes
• What constitutes an accent norm?

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Appendix 1 samples

• Male RP
• Female RP

• Male regional
• Female regional

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Results of Keyword analysis
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Keyword Categories

• nervous and not very confident
• positive, confident and independent
• boring and quiet
• interesting, outgoing, chatty, bubbly,
  straightforward
• average achiever, not very intelligent
• intelligent, well-educated, well-spoken,
  ambitious
• posh, snobby, spoilt
• friendly, relaxed, trustworthy, pleasant