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13СОВРЕМЕННЫЕ ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ В ИСТОРИЧЕСКОМ ОСВЕЩЕНИИ. ИР: ГЕНЕЗИС, ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ, ОБОЗРИМОЕ БУДУЩЕЕ Кулямина Г.А., Москитов Г.К.
“Все течет, все меняется”, - это изречение, определяющее постоянную изменчивость всего сущего, принадлежит древнегреческому философу Гераклиту. Первооснову мира он видел в постоянном движении и изменении. Несмотря на то, что мы уже вступили в XXI век, слова Гераклита, сказанные еще до нашей эры, определяют то, что происходит в любую эпоху, то, что происходит всегда. Только вот процесс изменений в наши дни можно сравнить не с плавным течением реки, а со стремительно несущимся потоком, переворачивающим, а иногда и сметающим все на своем пути.
Все изменения, происходящие в жизни общества, находят отражение в языке, затрагивают все уровни языковой системы, из которых самыми уязвимыми можно считать лексический и фонетический.
В нашем небольшом исследовании мы попытались проследить действие этих изменений именно на фонетическом уровне, при этом за основу мы взяли ЯР - английское произношение, которое вот уже многие годы считается эталоном. Правильно произнесенные звуки речи в данном случае являются не только эталоном. Произношение становится показателем общего уровня культуры личности, а если рассматривать проблему шире, то и общества, и уровень этот не должен снижаться под влиянием каких бы то ни было изменений.
MODERN LINGUISTIC PROBLEMS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. RP: GENESIS, EVOLUTION AND CONCEIVABLE FUTURE
Galina A. Kulyamina, Henry K. Moskatov
INTRODUCTION
4 4 rT he English have no respect for their T language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants - and not all of them - have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach
“The way you speak can affect your whole life”
The story of English, BBC TV, 1986
himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate or despise him”. That was a judgment of G.B. Shaw in 1912 and he was referring primarily to differences of accent. Commentators like George Orwell in the 1940s and A.H. Halsley in the 1980s have continued to tell us of “the snobbery which brands the tongue of every British
© Кулямина Г.А., Москатов Г.К., 2006
child”, and a writer in the “Observer” newspaper referred to the 1950s as a period in which there were still, in Britain, “two cultural nations: those with accents, and those even more absurdly styled as without accents”. Many would claim that this is indeed the case today [2: p. 7].
The attitudes towards accent which all the observers claim to have prevailed in GB for the greater part of the 20th century are the main subject of the paper. The questions to be developed in our work are as follows:
• How, why and when did they arise?
• Are they really prevalent today, or have the British become more tolerant about accents?
• Do the speakers of other languages, or of varieties of English spoken elsewhere in the world have the same forms of prejudice about differences of accent?
• What is the outlook for accent diversity?
• Can we look forward, perhaps, to a period in the near future when all these speech differences - which have, after all, been diminishing in the course of recent centuries - will disappear altogether, along with their attendant prejudices, so that we all end up speaking the English language with exactly the same accent?
• Is the accent just a solid, stable set of speech sounds?
1. A GLIMPSE OF RP PREHISTORY
1.1. Definition of accent
Shaw’s pronouncement was set down in the preface ‘A Professor of Phonetics’ to his well known play “Pygmalion”, which was later made into a musical, and then into a highly successful film, ‘My Fair Lady’. It tells the story of a language expert, professor Henry Higgins, who conceives the idea of turning
a Cockney flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle, into a duchess within a period of three months, by teaching her “how to speak beautifully”. His concern is to alter her accent, then to change other features of her dialect.
Accent is Higgins’s main concern, because he is a professor of phonetics, which he defines as “the science of speech”. In fact, as John Honey notes it in his work ‘Does Accent Matter? The Pygmalion Factor’ phonetics is, more precisely, the science of speech sounds. We need to be clear about the distance between accent and dialect, whose main components are as follows:
Dialect Accent
Pronunciation Pronunciation
Vocabulary
Grammar
Idiom
The single feature common to both dialect and accent is pronunciation.
Vocabulary - the word-stock of a given variety of language.
Grammar - deals in general rules for how we put words together.
Idiom - involves the set forms of speech which aren’t subject to generalized rules but are peculiar to one language (or one dialect) at any one time. Changes of idiom over the course of time are illustrated in Parson Woodforde’s diary entry of the two hundred years ago: “She was brought to bed of a child”. Writing nowadays one would say “gave birth to a child”, or just “had a baby” [2: p. 7].
A speaker with a Standard English accent has a total of some twenty vowels and two dozen consonants. All this is also true of other accents in which the English language is spoken, varieties which have grown up outside Britain in areas where the language has a long history of being used (American English,
Australian English, New Zealand English, Caribbean English) [2: p. 9].
In England, there is one accent that has come to stand out above all others, conveying associations of respectable social standing and a good education. This ‘prestige’ accent is known as Received Pronunciation, or RP. It is often associated with the south-east of England, where most RP-speakers live or work, but in fact it can be found everywhere in the country. Accents usually tell us where in the country a person is from; RP tells us only about a speaker’s social or educational background [1: p. 62].
As we know it from the history of the English language, as well as from the history of England, the ancient Britons spoke Celtic -an early form of Welsh. The English language grew out of the speech of the Angles and Saxons and other Germanic peoples who invaded these islands after the Romans had left in the fifth century AD. This Anglo-Saxon (Old English) was being spoken in England when William the Conqueror and his Norman followers invaded in 1066. Continuing close links with the continent helped to ensure that, for more than two centuries after the Conquest, French, which was the most influential language in Europe, was also the first language of English kings and of a small proportion of their nobility, although English remained the most commonly spoken language in the kingdom and, by the fourteenth century, reigned supreme.
The displacement in 1066 of Old English as the language of government removed an important standardizing influence, with the result that written English diversified into a number of regional dialects, until a transition period of around forty years from 1430
onwards, during which English effectively replaced Latin and French in the administrative records of central government. Meanwhile the evolution of Middle English out of Old English, from around 1100 onwards, was marked by the progressive enrichment of the vocabulary of English by contact with the Norman French, as it is well known, especially in areas such as law and administration, husbandry and housekeeping, and estate management [2: p.12].
1.2. Chaucer, Shakespeare
and the early New English period
Now we will try to trace further steps in RP history. Here we take a detailed review, given by John Honey, as a basis. Amid the enormous diversity of fifteenth-century English dialects, William Caxton began in 1476 to implement the communications revolution, which brought the printed word into every corner of the land. Not surprisingly, the form of English, which he used in his printing, reflected the linguistic usages of London. These in turn had by then been heavily influenced by the speech forms of ‘Midlands’ counties such as Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire. Because of the enormous authority of the written word, it was the grammar and vocabulary of this variety that came to be regarded as standard written English, though its spelling did not submit to complete regularization for several centuries more. Meanwhile, the ordinary people of England went on speaking the dialects of their localities, complete with their distinctive verb forms, vocabularies, and ways of pronouncing particular vowels and consonants. Interestingly, a relatively systematic process of sound change (known as ‘The Great Vowel Shift’)
affected many of the vowels of most varieties of English between the time of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare. As a result, the a sound in Shakespeare’s make moved a lot closer to our present-day pronunciation than it had been to Chaucer’s, which was more like aa. Shakespeare’s pronunciation offood was also more like ours, compared with Chaucer’s, whose version was closer to present-day RP ford. House had moved, by Shakespeare’s day, from Chaucer’s hous [hu:s] to a sound closer to the vowel in present-day host. Shakespeare’s pronunciation of light and night was probably very similar to our own, though in the course of his life he would have heard many people giving a slightly throaty sound to the gh (as can still be heard, for example, in Scotland) and also giving the i in those two words the short sound (as in bit, rather than bite). In Chaucer’s time both this older pronunciation of light and night could be heard in London. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare rhymed cut with our present-day (southern) standard English put, as indeed is still the case for English Northcountry folk. In Chaucer’s England the k in words like knee and knight, and the g in the words like gnaw, were sounded, as they were also for some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Whereas Chaucer pronounced the l in the words like talk, and calm, by Shakespeare’s time this sound was on its way out, at least for many speakers. One sound which was lost altogether in this transition from Middle English to Modern English was the one used to say words like fyr (fire) and bryd (bride). This required a very distinctive - and nowadays perhaps ‘un-English’ - rounding and forwarding of the lips, which the French use for u and the Germans for u. That is why in English one finds it so difficult to produce more than an Anglicized approximation in borrowed words like debut and deja vu.
Shakespeare’s own accent almost certainly changed during his lifetime. He grew up speaking the Stratford-upon-Avon variant of the Warwickshire dialect. At the hands of the pedantic schoolmaster he became familiar with the ‘purer’ textbook forms of some sounds, which by now were being promoted be certain writers of elegant speech. Once he had made his way to London he would have been influenced by his association with actors and writers - and their patrons - among whom an educated standard accent had already begun to establish itself.
But how can we possibly know how Shakespeare and his contemporaries pronounced English? A considerable body of evidence has enabled scholars, by a lot of detective work, to reconstruct with a high degree of probability the way people in London spoke in that period. The written works of Shakespeare and others have been analyzed to see how rhymes, puns, unstandardized spellings, and even metre can suggest how certain sounds resembled, or differed from, each other and from modern forms. Even more valuable are the writings of a number of commentators from that time who attempted to describe the exact sounds of English words, sometimes in comparison with French or Welsh and sometimes in a context where different regional dialects were discussed [2: p. 14].
1.3. On the way
to the NewEnglish (NE) period
Not only have we got a very good idea of the way English was pronounced in the 16th century, especially in London and the regions covered by the major dialect boundaries, we also know that by the first half of that century, and certainly by the time Shakespeare was
born, there was already a clear idea that there was a correct way of pronouncing English, that some forms of speech had already become a criterion of good birth and education, and that it was deliberately fostered and taught.
The particular form of generalized accent which had come to be regarded as the most ‘correct’ had a regional base: it belonged to the South of England and was not current in the North and West. In particular, it was the speech associated with London and the Home Counties, an area that took in the university towns of Cambridge and Oxford.
Another dimension to the way language is used relates to the specific social groups, including social classes, who use different dialects or accents. It is crucial to realize that the direct ancestor of British English’s present-day standard accent (RP) was not simply a particular regional one; it was also the property of a limited social group within that region. Contemporaries were quite clear that this group consisted of the Court - the highest social classes and the administrators - together with the gentry (and their educated clerks) in the immediate vicinity of London, plus the important category of the most educated, especially the academics of the only two universities which existed in England before the 19th century, Cambridge and Oxford.
Among the commonest criteria for the possession of such prestige are political power, economic power, and ‘educatedness’. The connections between London and various centers of political power such as the monarch and what we should nowadays call the civil service are obvious, and the constitutional struggles which led to the limitation of royal power and the extension of the authority of parliament did nothing to reduce 172
the significance of the capital city. Moreover, by the late 16th century London had assumed a unique importance in the economic life of the kingdom. The city’s position as the literary capital, attracting writers and offering special facilities for staging their plays and publishing their work, as well as its possession of a number of superior educational institutions which served the professions, added the third and possibly crucial ingredient to the formula underlying the adoption of the ‘educated’ accent of London and its environs as the target to which the ambitions would aspire.
Here we have the beginning of the present-day divide between the accent of South and North, and between RP and the accents associated with all the other regional and social dialects of the British Isles. In the 16th and 17th centuries the standard accent was far more limited in its distribution and in its availability as a model than it later became. As yet it had little influence in the North, and South of the River Trent (a boundary cited by commentators even in the 16th century) it was used by a far smaller proportion of people than is the case today.
It was by no means the case that all members of the country or the educated classes spoke with this accent. It was, more than anything else, the emergence of an educated class that gave impetus to the development and spread of a standard accent [2: p. 16].
Though by Shakespeare’s time the pronunciation of all the English dialects, including the emerging standard accent, was still undergoing change, the connection between that standard and the concept of ‘educatedness’ was an important stabilizing influence. Compared with the massive changes, especially in vowel sounds, between Chaucer’s time
and Shakespeare’s, the changes over the next two hundred years were relatively slight, even if the sum total of differences between Shakespeare’s English and ours seem large. The most noteworthy was the loss, in standard English, of the r sound in a whole range of words like card and port, a loss which spread throughout south-eastern, central, and parts of northern England by 1800, but did not in the same way affect all of the north-west, the south-west, nor, of course, Scotland.
From England alone some 300,000 emigrants left for North America and the West Indies between 1630 and 1690, so we are not surprised to find that the majority of the accents of those regions receiving migrants preserve that r which, over the next hundred years or so, was to disappear from RP. In America the retention of this r was reinforced by the regional backgrounds of many of the waves of later migrants. In England, the two a sounds in words like bath and castle, and in cat and sad, which were still very fluid by 1600, had settled down by 1800 into something like their present-day versions in RP, with northern England sharing with the Americans a shorter a than RP’s in bath and castle. The vowel in cup changed in RP to its present version, which contrasts with the northern cup vowel, but the latter did not pass into American usage, which shares RP’s cup vowel alongside such variants as the one which rhymes cup with RP’s burp. Over the same period speakers of the standard English accent learned to drop the final d which for centuries had been attached when ordinary folk talked of a scholard and his gownd [2: p. 18].
The American pronunciation of advertisement, with the stress on the third rather than
the second syllable, may have been current in standard British English (and even more probably in educated Scottish English) in the 18th century. The suffix -ile was in the 18th century normally pronounced in standard English in the way Americans now use, rhyming fertile with myrtle and making hostile indistinguishable from hostel: standard English changed to the -tile form some time after 1800.
1.4. RP evolution in late NE period
During the 19th century, RP became the accent of the public schools, such as Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, and was soon the main sign that the speaker had received a good education. Preparatory and public schools tended to foster the standard accent of the educated, though many of their most famous dons, even in the 19th century, spoke with marked traces of the regions from which they originated [1]. Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, attended Eton and Cambridge, but all his life sounded like a Norfolk squire. The fifteenth Earl of Derby, educated at Rugby and Cambridge, was Foreign Secretary in the 1860s and 1870s, and died in 1893. Disraeli described his lordship’s accent as “Lancashire patois”. Even Gladstone, who in 1821 at the age of twelve was “the prettiest little boy who ever went to Eton ”, and who later attended Oxford, retained in his accent the traces of a boyhood in Liverpool when a Lancashire accent was commonly heard. Sir Robert Peel grew up in Staffordshire and was at Harrow around 1800, then at Oxford. To the end of his life (1850) he reversed the vowel sounds of RP’s put (“putt”) and the first syllable of wonderful (“woonderful”) and had trouble with hs [2: p. 24]. It spread rapidly throughout the Civil Service
of the British Empire and the armed forces, and became the voice of authority and power.
Because RP had few regional overtones and was more widely understood than any regional accent, it came to be adopted by the BBC when radio broadcasting began in the 1920s. During the Second World War, the accent became associated in many people’s minds as the voice of freedom. The terms RP and BBC English became synonymous [1].
In this connection it seems timely to pay tribute to a man whose contribution to English phonetics can never be overestimated. We mean Daniel Jones (1881 - 1967), or ‘DJ’ as he was known within the profession [1]. He gave his first course in phonetics at University College London in 1907. He built up the Department of Phonetics there, becoming professor in 1921. He served on the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English from its foundation (1926). DJ also served as secretary of L’Association Phonetique Internationale from 1927 to 1949, when he retired from University teaching, and was president of the Association from 1950 until his death [1].
Professor D.Jones was the first to codify the properties of RP. It was not a label he much liked, as he confessed in ‘An Outline of English Phonetics’:
I do not consider it possible at the present time to regard any special type as ‘Standard’ or as intrinsically ‘better’ than other types. Nevertheless, the type described in this book is certainly a useful one. It is based on my own (Southern) speech, and is, as far as I can ascertain, that generally used by those who have been educated at ‘preparatory’ boarding schools and the ‘Public Schools’. The term ‘Received Pronunciation’is often used to designate this 174
type of pronunciation. This term is adopted here for want of better (1960, 9th edn, p.12).
These days, with the breakdown of rigid divisions between social classes and the development of the mass media, RP is no longer the preserve of a social elite. It is now best described as an ‘educated’ accent - or perhaps ‘accents’ would be more precise, for there are now several varieties. The most widely used variety is that generally heard on the BBC. But in addition there are both old-fashioned and trend-setting forms of RP. The trend-setting variety is often described as ‘far back’, ‘frightfully, frightfully’ - the ‘Sloane Ranger’ accent of the 1980s. The more conservative variety is found mainly in older speakers - what is sometimes referred to as ‘plummy’ tone of voice. It was heard in the recordings of BBC plays or announcements from the 1920s and 1930s [1: p. 64].
2. DIFFERENCES AND CHANGES
WITHIN RP
2.1. Age-Group Differences
In this section, summarizing material, represented by A. Hughes and P. Trudgill in their work devoted to this subject, we will try to give a brief outline of some differences currently to be found, largely as a result of age-group differences, within RP.
Table 1.1. The vowels of RP
pit [ I ] bee [ i: ] beer [18 ]
pet [ e ] bay [ el] bear [ ss]
pat [ ж ] buy [ al] bird [ э: ]
put [ u ] boy [ oi ] bard [ a: ]
putt [ л] boot [ u: ] board [ э: ]
pot [ Э ] boat [ ou ] poor [ us]
bout [ au ]
In addition to the vowels shown in table 1.1, older RP speakers have the vowel [ce] in words such as more, pore, which are thereby distinguished from maw, paw which have [c:]. Younger speakers, on the other hand, are losing the [ue] vowel of poor, and are beginning to merge pairs such as moor and more, poor and pore, so that the original three-way distinction has been lost altogether:
Table 1.2. The vowels [oe], [us] and [o:] in RP
Speakers’ age paw pore poor
older speakers [ э: ] [ ээ ] [ us]
middle-aged speakers [ э: ] [ о: ] [ us]
younger speakers [ о: ] [ о: ] [ о: ]
In a series of similar developments, the vowel [se] of there, pear is becoming monophthongal [s:] and the triphthongs [aIe] as in fire and [aue] as in power are becoming simplified to [a:]. This particularly true of the single word our, which large numbers of RP and non-RP speakers now pronounce [a:] even though they may retain [aue] in other words such as hour and flower.
A further feature which differentiates the conservative speech of older RP speakers from that of younger speakers involves the pronunciation of words such as off, lost, froth. We know that originally words of this type had the same short [c] vowel as words like hot, top. At some stage, however, a change took place in southern English accents (including RP) such that [c] became lengthened to [c:] before the voiceless fricatives [f], [s], [0]. During the 20th century, however, this innovation has been reversed, and the original short vowel pronunciation is being restored. This restoration appears to have been led particularly by middle-class speakers, with the result that pronun-
ciations such as off [c:f], lost [lc:st], froth [frc:0] are now most typical of low status working-class accents and, within RP, of older-fashioned more conservative or aristocratic speakers. If, therefore, a speaker says off [c:f] rather than [cf] he is likely to be older rather than younger, and upper middle class or working-class rather than lower middle class [3: p. 26 - 27].
2.2. Sound Split
One often cited example of lexical diffusion in English is a sound split, which took place in Southern British English and is also known as the trapbath split. In the latter part of the 17th century, the [»] in some but not all words which contained it began to lengthen, and then moved back, ultimately to [a:]. Currently, in Standard British English we have the pattern in table 1.3 (remember that RP is Received Pronunciation, a rather conservative variety of British English).
The change from [*] to [a:] appears to be most advanced in RP and other southern British English dialects, but has most notably not taken place in northern England [4: p. 74 -75].
2.3. Accent: more than a cluster
of sounds
The use of English has become increasingly less formal in recent years. This change is reflected in pronunciation. This is not the change that meets universal approval. One recent controversy was caused by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he appeared in a popular television program. Normally Mr. Blair speaks with an accent that’s been described variously as standard English pronunciation or received pronunciation - RP.
Table 1.3. The vowels [a:] and [да] in RP
The letters RP [ a: ] RP [ * ]
f staff, half, laugh gaffe
f + Consonant craft, after gaffed
path, bath math(s)
st last, past, nasty enthusiast, aster
sp grasp, clasp asp
sk ask, basket gasket, mascot
sl castle tassel, hassel
ns France, dance romance, fancy
nt aunt, grant ant, canter
n(t) branch expansion
mpl example, sample ample, trample
nd demand, remand panda, stand, grand
During the television program however Mr. Blair adopted an accent that is becoming increasingly common - an accent that’s been labeled “Estuary English”.
It’s a way of speaking, kind of variety of English, which is between the accent of standard British English and popular London speech Cockney. It is called “Estuary English” because of the Thames estuary. If we go back to the 2nd World War we see English predominated and at that time social networks were much more closed. So it was unlikely that RP speakers would have much social or work contact with Cockney speakers. Now what seems to have happened was a lot of mobility after the 2nd World War, a lot of people moving from the East End of London to the suburbs on the edges of the Thames estuary. But this mobility was also accompanied by social mobility: it became more usual for Cockney speakers and RP speakers to study and work together [5].
Perhaps the controversy surrounding Tony Blair’s appearance on a popular televi-176
sion program arose because his adoption of an estuary accent seemed incompatible with his position in authority.
Tony Thorn, director of Language Service at King’s College in London feels there was more to it than simply the Prime Minister dropping his standard of speech.
“I think it’s unconvincing. I think it has opposite effects. You can’t push this manipulation of language and accent too far. So you are destroying your own personality, or your own image.”
But isn’t this view is a little bit hush? After all don’t we all change the way we speak depending on who we speak to? David Rosewarn, teacher of linguistics:
“An English writer J.B. Priestly said that he felt that anybody who changed his accent was betraying his roots, and anyone who betrayed his roots was dishonest and therefore you couldn’t trust him with your money and you couldn’t trust him with politics. On the other hand you can argue that people have control of their own language and if they wish to modify it then, then why not?” [5].
But it is not that simple. In our opinion Received Pronunciation is in no case a cluster of definite phonemes and speech sounds. We can define it as a form, supposing a certain contents.
Experiments show that not only do many people give the highest prestige to the RP accent, they also attribute to RP speakers a long catalogue of favorable attributes. A speaker of RP is held to rate more highly than the speakers of all other varieties on the following qualities, distinguished by John Honey in the abovementioned work:
• intelligence;
• ambition;
• leadership;
• self-confidence;
• wealth;
• occupational status;
and even - amazing though it may seem:
• tallness;
• cleanliness [2].
Though the speakers of all varieties other than RP are considered not to be able to compete with RP speakers in above mentioned characteristics, they are often rated more highly than RP speakers on the following:
• friendliness
• good-naturedness
• generosity
• kind-heartedness
• honesty
• integrity
• sense of humour [2].
Setting aside the less credible attributes (cleanliness, tallness etc), and here we fully agree with John Honey, that the common threads running through the qualities most often cited (intelligence, occupational status, self confidence, etc) are associations in a general way with educatedness and with competence, especially competence in sophisticated tasks involving the possession of detailed knowledge and a wide range of uses of language.
The attributes ascribed to the speakers of non-standard accents also have two common threads: sociability and solidarity (friendliness, humour, etc) [2: p. 53].
CONCLUSION
Regionally modified speech seems already to make a come-back in educated British society. In late Victorian times, regional accents were heavily stigmatized, and, as David Crystal notices, this attitude is still to be found. But times are changing. Several contemporary politicians make a virtue out of their regional background, and the BBC employs several announcers with regionally modified accents. Nor is it uncommon, these days, to find educated people expressing hostility towards RP, both within and outside Britain, because of its traditional association with conservative values.
Nonetheless, RP continues to be the most widely used accent in the Court, Parliament, the Church of England, the legal profession, and other national institutions. It has received more linguistic research than any other accent. It is still the only accent taught to foreigners who wish to learn a British model, and it is thus widely used abroad. In fact, today there are far more foreign speakers of RP in other countries than mother-tongue users in Britain [1].
Students should not feel that they need to achieve RP perfectly but as a model it is very useful. RP can be understood all around the world by anyone who speaks English.
Modifications taking place in RP should be regarded as a natural process of living language development. Our world is constantly changing, and so does the language.
Yes, RP is definitely and naturally subject to change; and it could not be otherwise. But we believe, hope and more than that we are
771
confident that it will remain a fascinating, pale blue and pink horizon, undoubtly attracting and encouraging those who are striving for intelligence, educatedness and competence. So long live RP!
The natural process mentioned can be either evolution or involution, degradation. It concerns all walks of life, and culture and language are not an exception.
We should cultivate the best of RP as we cultivate tact, taste and manners.
Can we, those who are involved in and responsible for education afford observing these elemental changes, remaining absolutely detached and indifferent?
References
1. Crystal David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, 1995.
2. Honey John. Does Accent Matter? The Pygmalion Factor. London, Boston, 1990.
3. Hughes A., Trudgill P. English accent and dialect: an introduction to social and regional varieties of British English. London, 1980.
4. Linguistics: An Introduction. Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, David Britain, Andrew Spencer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
5. BBC: Educational Programs, 2003.
