Essay On Received Pronunciation

Received Pronunciation to poor English pronunciation; ESL learner.
The term Received Pronunciation is usually credited to Daniel Jones. The word “received”, simply means “accepted” or “approved”. Received pronunciation is the standard accent of standard English in Great Britain, as spoken in the south of England. According to Catford (1977), “in the first edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary by Daniel Jones in 1917, he named that accent public school pronunciation. However, in the second edition of his dictionary in 1926, he called the same accent “received pronunciation”. This pronunciation model was also known as Oxford English because it was traditionally the common speech of Oxford University. Received pronunciation is an accent

Received pronunciation is believed to be based on the southern accent of England. However, it has a lot of features in common with the early modern English dialect of the east midlands; a mixture of London speech with elements of east midlands, middle Essex, and Essex became known as received pronunciation. At this point, it is important to note that as is characteristic of any language, received pronunciation went to a state of flux. The Cambridge English pronouncing dictionary used the term “BBC Pronunciation” because they believe that at this point, the name, “Received Pronunciation” has become archaic (Daniel Jones 2003). And that BBC News presenters no longer suggest high social class and privilege to their listeners, a particular phonetician called Jack Windsor Lewis has criticized the term “Received pronunciation” as “invidious, ridiculously archaic, parochial and question begging”. Even the international phonetic association in their handbook use the name “Standard Southern British” in place of “Received Pronunciation.” IPA Handbook (1999) states that Standard Southern British is the modern equivalent of what has been called “Received Pronunciation (RP)…” it is an accent of the