Received Pronunciation Analysis
WHAT THEN IS RP?
The term ‘Received Pronunciation (RP)’ was used by Daniel Jones in his English Pronouncing Dictionary and The Outline of English Phonetics to describe the standard British English pronunciation. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, the term wielded influence and was adopted in many other works seeking to describe an accent of that status. However, the claim has been consistently made that only 3% of the population of Britain use this accent (Crystal, 1995:365; Milroy and Milroy, 2012:151), suggesting that even in its native home, RP has limited accessibility. Surprisingly, this is the accent after which many African Englishes are modeled. Although attempts have been made to capture the different variations which abound even within
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The said accent which is obviously an evolved and evolving version of RP is, in this study, tagged General British (GB) after Cruttenden (2014). This accent parallels General American (GA) – the American English accent which does not have marked regional characteristics.
Paying particular attention to the Nigerian situation, the next section will attempt a comparison of the features of General British (GB hereafter), General American (GA hereafter) and the Nigerian English Accent (NEA) with a view to identifying the divergences which constitute a source of confusion to the Nigerian
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In this section, we would beam our light on these three accents: what is so different about them? Our focus will mainly be on their vowel systems which usually constitute sources of divergences.
Studies have shown that GB, the prestige British English accent, has a total of 20 sounds in its vowel inventory (12 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs). GA, on the other hand, has 16 (11 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs) while Nigerian English has 13 (7 monophthongs and 6 diphthongs). Beyond the disparity in their numbers, such studies have also gone ahead to reveal clear differences in the composition of the individual phoneme inventories.
GB has as her monophthongs /i:, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ:, ɒ, ɔ:, ʊ, u:, ʌ, ɜ:, ə/. GA has all the above with the exception of /ɒ/, which it realizes as /ɑ:/ as in dog, job, coffee, pocket, logic and spot; or /ɔ:/ as in across, often and cough (where it occurs before a voiceless plosive. GA /ɜ/ is r-coloured and, as such, is often captured as /ɝ /. In place of GB /ɑ:/, GA has /a/ before voiceless fricatives and also before a sequence of a nasal and another consonant. NEA has /i, ɛ, a, ɔ, u, o, e/ all of which are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from both GB and GA vowels. In the diphthongs category, GB has /əʊ, aʊ, aɪ, eɪ, ɔɪ, ɪə, ɛə, ʊə/ while Ame E has /oʊ, aʊ, aɪ, eɪ,
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