ABSTRACT
An accent relates to a person’s pronunciation. Everyone who speaks has an accent but people often think of the accent which approximates to the prestigious network norms as being ‘clearest’, ‘most intelligible’, ‘best’, even ‘accentless’. Unlike French, which has an Académie to arbitrate on pronunciation, the English language has never had a single spoken standard. Nevertheless, the notion of a socially prestigious accent goes back at least as far as the sixteenth century, when grammarians began to suggest that the most acceptable form of pronunciation was that used by educated speakers in London and at the Court. (The term accent is often popularly confused with dialect. It is, however, perfectly possible to speak the standard language with a regional accent.)
As far as the UK is concerned, the most prestigious accent is RP (Received Pronunciation). This variety was characterised in the mid-nineteenth century by A.J.Ellis and in the twentieth century by Daniel Jones. RP was originally an educated regional accent but it became the accent of social position and privilege-the accent used by educated speakers in the southeast of England, in Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools such as Eton and Harrow. In the 1930s it was adopted by the BBC as the accent for news broadcasts. In this way, RP came to be associated with the ‘right way’ of speaking, and through its use in education and the media it has exerted an influence on all speech in the UK. In the early part of this century, it was impossible to hold a post of any seniority in the army, government or law unless one’s speech approximated to RP. It was against this background that G.B.Shaw wrote Pygmalion:
…for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment…
(Preface to 1912 edition)
Nowadays in the UK there is more tolerance towards regionally-marked accents, but RP continues to be the most prestigious accent and the one still used by the media for all official pronouncements.
