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So does this mean that “RP” is a conscious choice? Do people moving to Oxford just decide to speak it? How is this possible, if most people (I thought) are unaware of their own accent?
If unconscious, how does it seem to spread to people who need to use it? (I am guessing for instance, back in the day, BBC radio announcers, for instance?)
People readily become aware of their own accent if they find themselves in an environment where it’s non-standard. They notice that the people around them speak with a different accent, and frequently they notice how others react to their own accent.
They may make a conscious choice to acquire (in this instance) an R.P. accent, or they may simply absorb one through immersion, as it were. The fact that the R.P. accent is a marker of social class and status is an incentive to acquire it, as does the fact that most other British accents are strongly regionally marked, and you don’t have to relocate very far at all from where you were reared in order to find that your manner of speech marks you as an incomer.
You can study it formally (and, famously, in the past students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London were all explicitly expected to study and acquire the accent, for which reason it’s sometimes called the “RADA accent”), but I think most people who aren’t raised with it but acquire it later do so by imitation rather than formal study.
I went over Mancunian gibberish in another thread. Long ago I noticed on BBC shows on American TV that I’d have a hard time understanding some of what was said, but not all of it. Eventually I realized the dialogue was often in a regional accent while the dialogue and narration was that proper kind of speech. I noticed the same kind of thing with English people I’ve spoken to over the years and I get the impression that they can turn on that *proper *speech when they want to. However, it has been mostly college educated people I’ve spoken to. In the other thread I mentioned one fellow from Manchester noted that the other fellow hardly anyone can understand had been to school and should be able to speak some form of English that everyone else can understand.
And let’s not forget that plentya Mercans tawk funny too.
It’s more a case that people’s accents tend to be stronger in informal settings, when they are among others from the same area. A TV show set in a particular region will try to reflect the way people in that region speak, some more accurately than others. The person announcing the show may have any regional accent these days, but they will be making an effort to be as clear as possible.
I’m sure that’s true in America too.
It’s true for Spanish as well: if you’re speaking with people from other areas you do your best to avoid regionalisms, shortcuts, dialectal variations… and that means Academic Spanish, aka “sounding like a TVE newscaster” (as my Latin American and Southern Spanish coworkers called it). Lately I’ve been finding it enormously irritating when I’m watching a movie where every actor speaks with accents that would make an Academic swoon while the characters wouldn’t know how (cf. The Cable Girls, all of whom apparently went to the same prep school as well as wearing the same lipstick shade that didn’t exist until very recently; compare with Ministry of Time, where people do have different accents and mannerisms and the only one who sounds academic is Cayetana Guillén Cuervo, for whom it really is her accent).
Certainly. A TV show will want to sound genuine and have the performers use the accent appropriate for their role. Actors will often be able to speak with different accents as well, although not always genuine. Not every narrator or announcer here will use the Omaha Nebraska “ideal” because we make blatant appeals to regional popularity and have a certain affinity for non-uniformity, but I imagine that happens elsewhere as well.
Yes, although I don’t see it as just an appeal to regional popularity. At least not here in the UK. I don’t think anyone cheers just because they hear their own accent on the news. RP is associated with an upper-class upbringing. For a long time, a tiny section of the population, representing a ruling elite, were the only ones whose voices were permitted on TV. It would be considered old fashioned and elitist today.
Is that the same thing as “BBC English” ?
Not as far as I’m concerned. BBC English is more a matter of style, vocubulary, preferred terminology, perhaps a standard pronunciation for controverted words etc. It’s independent of accent.
Yes, most Brits are very familiar with RP; it’s still the way most people speak on TV.
It can be amusing sometimes to meet someone with a thick Glaswegian or Scouse accent, say, who can slip seamlessly into Cumberbatch-style English.
I envy them; I’ve never had much of any accent and can’t mimic any either.
I grew up in the midlands which has a pretty harsh set of accents. Mine was never that strong, but it was enough to cause ridicule at university during freshers week! I had to learn to say toooothbrush rather than tuff brush as everyone thought that was hilarious.
So I consciously dropped my regional accent and adopted something close to RP. Most people assume that I’m posher and richer than I really am and very few people can work out where I grew up.
If I visit family for a few days my accent falls back to a mild Black Country one.
I consciously acquired something close to RP (with a little Estuary thrown in) at uni, rather than either the Coloured English accent or the White South African one.
Neither of those claims is really true. Most people are used to hearing RP, but could no more imitate it than they could any other accent. A fair number of TV personalities either learnt it at stage school or at one of the elite universities where it is common, but, there are probably more exceptions than there are examples. It’s hard to say definitively, because it’s quite poorly defined and varies from speaker to speaker.
Is the RP a native accent that originated naturally in Oxford University then? Or artificially crafted?
Well, it’s changed over the years, but I think it originated naturally among the upper classes in the south and was taught as formally correct in the public schools. Education was about “bettering oneself”, and it would do you little good to know lots of facts if people took you for a commoner.
I imagine, at a time when it was impossible for anyone from a working class background to ever go to Oxford (as opposed to now when it is only very unlikely) all the boys would have thoroughly acquired it in boarding school, long before they got there.
You said my claims are not true, then agreed with the first, and tentatively say the other is probably not true in your opinion. 
I used to speak with a North London accent (‘Norf Lunnon’ :)), but now have a BBC accent.
I remember a long time ago when I introduced two friends - one from Glasgow with a strong local Scottish accent and one from Newcastle with an equally strong ‘Geordie’ accent.
I could understand both of them, but I literally needed to translate about half their conversation to each other!
Given the context, I took your first claim to be that most British people were capable of speaking in an RP accent, not just that they were used to hearing it. Apologies if I misinterpreted what you were saying.
As for the second, I would say it is untrue, but I can’t exactly prove it. Firstly, we would need to be very specific about what we mean by RP, and then we would need to list everyone on British TV to see if they met the criteria. You welcome to undertake such an endeavour. I’m just going to guesstimate.
I googled “top British TV presenters” and of the names that came up, (at least those I recognise) there are a couple with what I consider RP, several debatable ones, and several more with regional accents.
Not very scientific, I know, but it’s the best I can do. To be fair, if you were including newsreaders, that would probably significantly increase the number of RP speakers. It’s also annoyingly over-represented in film, where it might is shorthand, particularly in American films, for character traits such as intelligence, charm or cruelty. Patrick Stewart, Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Grant and basically the entire Galactic Empire in Star Wars immediately come to mind.
o/It's "aoow" and "gaarn" that keep her in her place Not her wretched clothes and dirty face o/
I spent a few years dating a native Chinese woman from Dalian, and when we were going to bed she would tutor me in basic Mandarin. I learned enough Mandarin to hold most simple conversations; about 1000 words was my original goal, but I picked up more over time. It was a lot harder than learning say, Spanish, as the tone in which you say a word will change its meaning.
When I traveled to mainland China some years later, I got a lot of comments about my accent. Apparently I spoke like an effeminate Northerner, who was far too polite. This, in combination with my normal American accent, lead to lots of (good natured) teasing from the people I met there.
I honestly couldn’t hear the difference between my accent and theirs.