That’s rather an arbitrary distinction, though, isn’t it - it neglects, for example, the populations of Sri Lanka, Malta, India, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, the Philippines etc., who all speak English as their first language.
Quick questions about RP:
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I was aware that some people spoke RP in everyday discourse. Is the number of people speaking RP in non-academic settings increasing, decreasing, or staying about level? I was under the impression that common-use RP was dying out.
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Few children learn RP at their mother’s knee, correct? Isn’t RP something that someone essentially learns as an adolescent in academic settings?
Thanks, everton!
Yes it is. As dialects go, it doesn’t get much more arbitrary than Mid-Atlantic.
There’s a practical barrier to including the dialects of Sri Lanka, Malta, India, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, and the Philippines into a kind of Pan-English dialect. That barrier is that there are already well-established standards in place, namely RP and American Standard (aka “announcerspeak”).
As an academic exercise, development of a Pan-English dialect works. But getting Pan-English used in the media … well, there’s a lot of inertia to overcome. Plus, matters linguistic can’t be settled by fiat.
But these people also have their versions of announcerspeak too - or are you just referring to getting American and British announcers to use an averaged dialect? Whichever, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
BTW, my natural accent is very close to RP (Home Counties, middle-class parents), though now it’s presumably been influenced by more than a decade out of the country.
Well, my belief is that the answer to both questions is “yes”, and these people would seem to agree on the first point but not the second. It talks about the replacement of RP with the less “posh-sounding” Estuary English:
This change is quite recent, however. When I was at school and university in the '70s/'80s people might have either kept their local accent for life or if they adopted RP they would have done so under peer pressure at Oxford or Cambridge Universities.
Oh, that was to bordelond’s questions about RP.
Coupled with your earlier post picking apart every sentence of my post leads me to think that you have forgotten the agreement you accepted when you registered to be a member of this message board, and i quote " We have only one rule: Don’t be a jerk."
I thought that the straight dope was a place to come and ask questions that boggle your mind and hopes that someone out there will have the knowledge to provide a sufficient answer… not a place to be criticized for you ignorance by those who are fair more intellectually superior.
I’m not a linguist, I’ll admit, and for that very reason I can to straight dope to find a textbook explaination of the illusion of the accent. I got my answer from several cooperative and respectful individuals who neither mocked my ignorance on the subject or insulted my inability to think their level.
Not to be snarky, but as has been explained repeatedly in the thread, no, there isn’t. As far as I can tell, Monty is criticizing you not for perceived inferiority; it’s because people have explained over and over why there isn’t a “pure” or “standard” form of the language and until just a couple of posts ago you didn’t seem to be getting it. Maybe it’s just a miscommunication…?
I’m from the Midwest, the no-accent zone of the US, and it never occurred to me that I could have an accent until I went to England. But I became self-conscious about my American accent pretty quickly while I was there. Especially when the kids at McDonald’s would grin at the way I talked and try to get me to say something else, more or less exactly the way American kids would for an English person.
Report me then. Since I dissected your post based on its numerous invalid assumptions, that’s your problem & nothing to do with the fact of the matter of my jerkhood. Just because you don’t like getting called when you post invalid assumptions as fact does not make me a jerk. OTOH, it makes you appear to be whining & is really bad form.
Well, it is a place to ask questions. What it is not is a place to be coddled with invalid and prejudicial attitudes such as those you posted as though they were Truth From On High[sup]trademark[/sup]. And that especially applies when you try to tell someone who knows full well that what you posted was malarkey.
j
It’s not your ignorance I pointed out. Something else entirely.
and what was that?
Here’s an interesting experiment for the OP if (s)he so desires to try it.
Listen to a newscast played on one of the foreign-language broadcasts. Be sure to use a program that follows the “official stuff followed by inane chatter” format. I’ve enjoyed listening to the Philippine news broadcasts that follow it. Even if you don’t speak the language, you’ll notice a distinct difference in tone/enunciation/word choice and manner between when the announcers are reading the news and when they’re commenting on it or other subjects. In my experience, the same is true of broadcasts in Japanese, Korean, and a few other languages.
In short, all languages have a “prestige register” and a number of other registers.
I was obviously making fun of that malarkey you posted about the South and especially your presumption that because you tell me you’re from the South, you are then automatically an expert on the subject. Since what you posted about the South is demonstrably false, your expertise isn’t worth squat and I pointed that out. You got peeved and I pointed that out also.
i suppose the malarky you refer to is what i said about a southern accent being an undesirable one to have.
and my assumption that you, being from california, wouldn’t understand. well, from what i gathered, you are from the south too, but have a very different OPINION on the matter.
all i was saying is that from my expirience, i don’t like my accent and i know more people than not that, when catching themselves talking like a hick, are quick to correct themselves and are embarrassed for speaking that way.
maybe you are proud…and im sure there are others that are too. all i said was that I didn’t see how someone would WANT to talk like a southerner (as someone had posted) because of the experience i have had speaking like one.
and to Cervaise,
i got it at like 10:00 this morning about 2 posts after i made this thread. it has just turned into a debate of english vs american and southen vs not. plus, the opinion kept swithing from the fact that there was a standard to which a flat american-english was made (announcerspeak) to the fact that even announcerspeak had an accent and back and forth. i get it…everything has an accent and “accentless” is a figment of or perception.
Okay, so you’re proud of prejudice. That also is a problem you may wish to review. Also, I’m not from the South; however, I have a Southern accent due to my long residences (yes, the plural is correct here) in Dixie.
At any rate, try the experiment I mentioned above.
I like to believe that New Jersey and California are the most accent-free areas in the U.S. Many New Yorkers have that kind of Italian-let-me-make-you-a-pizza-slash-Coffee-Talk accent, which would exclude them. I’ve never heard a California accent because (in my mind, at least), it doesn’t exist. I’ve never heard a New Jersey accent either; although, I have heard it sounds a little like the New Yorker one. No one arround me speaks with an accent. Not trying to prove my accent-freeness, but I think it may be because of my parents. One had a slight Oregonian accent, and the other had a strong Filipino accent. I guess I just ignored how they talked and stuck to pronouncing things like they are in the dictionary. I mean, how can I not be accent-free? 
On a side note, I do a mean Sean Connery.
then i apologize Monty, i didn’t mean to sound like an expert, I was just trying to put my opinion on the table (obviously the wrong thing to do). and peeved isn’t so much the word as insulted (and where i’m from, although grammatically incorrect, we spell YA’LL like this…so i cannot be mocked for my regional spelling differentiation).
i have listened to foreign newscast while in china and see your point exactly. i get it. i didn’t mean to sound whinny either (the femal nature i suppose) but i refuse to be insulted to tears for foming my ignorant opinions.
My thanks to everton for information on Received Pronunciation and Estuary English.
I recall hearing a report on the BBC World Service some years ago about how Estuary English was receiving increasing acceptance as a standard or refined way of speaking. If I understand correctly, Michael Caine generally speaks with an Estuary English accent, and the Received Pronunciation is used by the royal family and was what Rex Harrison set out to teach in My Fair Lady.
Although there is no true equivalent of the Received Pronunciation in the United States, the bland, neutral “announcer speak” in the U. S. is more-or-less the same as the accent commonly spoken in and around Evanston and Winnetka, Illinois. Similar accents are found throughout the Midwest and the west coast.
The main campus of Northwestern University is located in Evanston, a northern suburb of Chicago. The schools of journalism and broadcasting there had a significant influence on the early development of national radio and television broadcasting, with many prominent announcers and correspondents of the 1940s and 50s being graduates.
People who spent a significant part of their youth in Winnetka Illinois include Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret, Ralph Bellamy, and (IIRC) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield.
Having lived 47 years in St. Louis, Missouri, I can offer some observations about the accent here.
People here do not, as a rule, pronounce forty four as “farty far”, although this is commonly believed, even in St. Louis. Rather, many people make a sound which is intermediate of “or” and “ar” when saying “forty”. In the same way, some New Yorkers make a sound which is intermediate of “oi” and “ir”; thus people trying to imitate a particular sort of New York accent will say “toimirl” for “turmoil” and “it choiped like a boid”. That is close to how people actually speak, but not the same. Interestingly, it is my observation that people who have trouble pronouncing the “or” in “forty” can generally give a standard pronunciation of “four”. They say something like like “fawrty four”.
Many such people also call the plumbing fixture commonly found in bathrooms and kitchens a “zinc”.
It is also common for people from St. Louis to have trouble pronouncing the “a” in “Washington”, so that the word comes out as something like “Warshington”.
These are examples of what is sometimes called a “Hyde Park” accent. This is not a reference to the park in north St. Louis nor, obviously, to the park in London, but to a town in Iowa. Linguists have found that people in and around this area of Iowa tend to have the same habits of pronunciation.
St. Louisans also often have an interesting way of pronouncing “interesting”, dividing the syllables thus: “int–eresting”. Many have a habit of ending sentences with the word “at”, as in “that’s where I work at”, or “that’s where I went to school at”.
It has been my observation that all of these habits are a subject for amusement for people from Chicago or it northern suburbs; other than a few distinctive habits of this kind, people from St. Louis generally speak a great deal like people from northern Illinois.
The habits I have described are locally associated with sounding like a “Hoosier”. Outside of St. Louis a “Hoosier” is a native of Indiana. In and around St. Louis the word signifies an ill-bred working class white person, most often someone who grew up south of Arsenal Street and who’s grandmother keeps a spit cup for her tobacco juice on the ironing board.
Like many native St. Louisans, I am relatively free of these habits. For more than ten years I worked for a Federal agency located in St. Louis, and I had telephone conversations with people around the country who regularly did business with the agency who expressed disbelief that I was from St. Louis. Oddly, they had no consensus as to where I did sound as those I were from. I was told that I sounded as though I was from Virginia, from Massachusetts, and from Oregon.
Oh, and don’t mind the extra R I threw in there. There are pirates about. 
[hijack]
Wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone spoke with a pirate’s accent?
[/hijack]
My thanks to everton for information on Received Pronunciation and Estuary English.
I recall hearing a report on the BBC World Service some years ago about how Estuary English was receiving increasing acceptance as a standard or refined way of speaking. If I understand correctly, Michael Caine generally speaks with an Estuary English accent, and the Received Pronunciation is used by the royal family and was what Rex Harrison set out to teach in My Fair Lady.
Although there is no true equivalent of the Received Pronunciation in the United States, the bland, neutral “announcer speak” in the U. S. is more-or-less the same as the accent commonly spoken in and around Evanston and Winnetka, Illinois. Similar accents are found throughout the Midwest and the west coast.
The main campus of Northwestern University is located in Evanston, a northern suburb of Chicago. The schools of journalism and broadcasting there had a significant influence on the early development of national radio and television broadcasting, with many prominent announcers and correspondents of the 1940s and 50s being graduates.
People who spent a significant part of their youth in Winnetka Illinois include Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret, Ralph Bellamy, and (IIRC) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield.
Having lived 47 years in St. Louis, Missouri, I can offer some observations about the accent here.
People here do not, as a rule, pronounce forty four as “farty far”, although this is commonly believed, even in St. Louis. Rather, many people make a sound which is intermediate of “or” and “ar” when saying “forty”. In the same way, some New Yorkers make a sound which is intermediate of “oi” and “ir”; thus people trying to imitate a particular sort of New York accent will say “toimirl” for “turmoil” and “it choiped like a boid”. That is close to how people actually speak, but not the same. Interestingly, it is my observation that people who have trouble pronouncing the “or” in “forty” can generally give a standard pronunciation of “four”. They say something like like “fawrty four”.
Many such people also call the plumbing fixture commonly found in bathrooms and kitchens a “zinc”.
It is also common for people from St. Louis to have trouble pronouncing the “a” in “Washington”, so that the word comes out as something like “Warshington”.
These are examples of what is sometimes called a “Hyde Park” accent. This is not a reference to the park in north St. Louis nor, obviously, to the park in London, but to a town in Iowa. Linguists have found that people in and around this area of Iowa tend to have the same habits of pronunciation.
People here commonly substitute the sound of a short “i” for a short “e”, saying “pin” when they mean “pen” and “win” rather than “when”. This is also common in many parts of the South.
St. Louisans also often have an interesting way of pronouncing “interesting”, dividing the syllables thus: “int–eresting”. Many have a habit of ending sentences with the word “at”, as in “that’s where I work at”, or “that’s where I went to school at”.
It has been my observation that all of these habits are a subject for amusement for people from Chicago or it northern suburbs; other than a few distinctive habits of this kind, people from St. Louis generally speak a great deal like people from northern Illinois.
The habits I have described are locally associated with sounding like a “Hoosier”. Outside of St. Louis a “Hoosier” is a native of Indiana. In and around St. Louis the word signifies an ill-bred working class white person, most often someone who grew up south of Arsenal Street and who’s grandmother keeps a spit cup for her tobacco juice on the ironing board.
Like many native St. Louisans, I am relatively free of these habits. For more than ten years I worked for a Federal agency located in St. Louis, and I had telephone conversations with people around the country who regularly did business with the agency who expressed disbelief that I was from St. Louis. Oddly, they had no consensus as to where I did sound as those I were from. I was told that I sounded as though I was from Virginia, from Massachusetts, and from Oregon.