In a writing system , a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme —the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters.
72-500: I , or i , is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the modern English alphabet , the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is i (pronounced / ˈ aɪ / ), plural ies . In English, the name of the letter is the "long I" sound, pronounced / ˈ aɪ / . In most other languages, its name matches
144-509: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in
216-628: A postalveolar approximant , which would normally be expressed with the sign [ɹ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet , but the sign /r/ is nonetheless traditionally used for RP in most of the literature on the topic. Voiceless plosives ( /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , /tʃ/ ) are aspirated at the beginning of a syllable, unless a completely unstressed vowel follows. (For example, the /p/ is aspirated in "impasse", with primary stress on "-passe", but not "compass", where "-pass" has no stress.) Aspiration does not occur when /s/ precedes in
288-429: A syllabic nasal ( bitten [ˈbɪʔn̩] ). The glottal stop may be realised as creaky voice ; thus, an alternative phonetic transcription of attempt [əˈtʰemʔt] could be [əˈtʰemm̰t] . As in other varieties of English, voiced plosives ( /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ , /dʒ/ ) are partly or even fully devoiced at utterance boundaries or adjacent to voiceless consonants . The voicing distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds
360-539: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c. 1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from
432-445: A basis for description in textbooks and classroom materials. RP has been the traditional choice for teachers and learners of British English . However, the choice of pronunciation model is difficult, and the adoption of RP is in many ways problematic. Nasals and liquids ( /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , /r/ , /l/ ) may be syllabic in unstressed syllables . The consonant /r/ in RP is generally
504-557: A blog entry on 16 March 2012 that when growing up in the north of England he used /ɑː/ in "bath" and "glass", and considers this the only acceptable phoneme in RP. Others have argued that /æ/ is too categorical in the north of England to be excluded. Clive Upton believes that /æ/ in these words must be considered within RP and has called the opposing view "south-centric". Upton's Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English gives both variants for BATH words. A. F. Gupta's survey of mostly middle-class students found that /æ/
576-505: A form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota ( ⟨Ι, ι⟩ ) to represent /i/ , the same as in the Old Italic alphabet . In Latin (as in Modern Greek ), it was also used to represent /j/ and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter ' j ' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for both the vowel and
648-454: A front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', 'İ') and lowercase ('ı', 'i') forms. The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs ( [REDACTED] ) and without serifs ( [REDACTED] ). Usually these are considered equivalent, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as the 1978 version of the African reference alphabet . In that system,
720-527: A hooked ascender and a baseline serif. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle . The uppercase I does not have a dot, while the lowercase 'i' does in most Latin-derived alphabets. The dot can be considered optional and is usually removed when applying other diacritics . However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet , have two kinds of I: dotted and dotless . In Turkish, dotted İ and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing
792-420: A monosyllabic triphthong. In more casual speech the middle vowel may be considerably reduced, by a process known as smoothing , and in an extreme form of this process the triphthong may even be reduced to a single long vowel. In such a case the difference between /aʊə/ , /aɪə/ , and /ɑː/ in tower , tire , and tar may be neutralised with all three units realised as [ɑː] or [äː] . This type of smoothing
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#1732849059951864-417: A new system (which he calls Standard Southern British English, or SSB) as a replacement. Lindsey's system is as follows—differences between it and standard transcription are depicted with the usual transcription in brackets. Like all accents, RP has changed with time. For example, sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was usual for speakers of RP to pronounce
936-455: A p and m a rry , /ɒ/ in l o t and o range , /ə/ in a go and sof a . Examples of long vowels : /iː/ in fl ee ce , /uː/ in g oo se , /ɛː/ in b ear , /ɜː/ in n ur se and f ur ry , /ɔː/ in n or th , f or ce and th ou ght , /ɑː/ in f a ther and st ar t . The long mid front vowel /ɛː/ is elsewhere transcribed with the traditional symbols ⟨ ɛə, eə ⟩. The predominant realisation in contemporary RP
1008-475: A prestige norm there and (to varying degrees) in other parts of the British Isles and beyond. Faced with the difficulty of defining a single standard of RP, some researchers have tried to distinguish between sub-varieties: Traditionally, Received Pronunciation has been associated with high social class. It was the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk [had] been educated at
1080-603: A series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift , Middle English /iː/ changed to Early Modern English /ei/ , which later changed to /əi/ and finally to the Modern English diphthong /aɪ/ in General American and Received Pronunciation . Because the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" ⟨i⟩ in traditional English grammar. The letter ⟨i⟩
1152-500: A special class of dictionary giving a wide range of possible pronunciations: British pronunciation dictionaries are all based on RP, though not necessarily using that name. Daniel Jones transcribed RP pronunciations of words and names in the English Pronouncing Dictionary . Cambridge University Press continues to publish this title, as of 1997 edited by Peter Roach . Two other pronunciation dictionaries are in common use:
1224-515: A symbol of the southeast's political power in Britain. Based on a 1997 survey, Jane Stuart-Smith wrote, "RP has little status in Glasgow, and is regarded with hostility in some quarters". A 2007 survey found that residents of Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to dislike RP. It is shunned by some with left-wing political views, who may be proud of having accents more typical of the working classes. Since
1296-414: A weak dental plosive ; the sequence /nð/ is often realised as [n̪n̪] (a long dental nasal ). /l/ has velarised allophone ( [ɫ] ) in the syllable rhyme . /h/ becomes voiced ( [ɦ] ) between voiced sounds. Examples of short vowels : /ɪ/ in k i t , m i rror and rabb i t , /ʊ/ in f oo t and c oo k , /e/ in dr e ss and m e rry , /ʌ/ in str u t and c u rry , /æ/ in tr
1368-662: Is monophthongal . Many conventional descriptions of the RP vowel system group the non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short". This should not be taken to mean that RP has minimal pairs in which the only difference is vowel length. "Long" and "short" are convenient cover terms for a number of phonetic features. The long-short pairings shown above include also differences in vowel quality. The vowels called "long" high vowels in RP /iː/ and /uː/ are slightly diphthongized , and are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs [ɪi] and [ʊu] . Vowels may be phonologically long or short (i.e. belong to
1440-532: Is a variable quantity differing from individual to individual, although all its varieties are 'received', understood and mainly unnoticed". Although a form of Standard English had been established in the City of London by the end of the 15th century, it did not begin to resemble RP until the late 19th century. RP has most in common with the dialects of what has been termed the South East Midlands, in particular
1512-403: Is adopted in the latest revision of Gimson's Pronunciation of English . Beverley Collins and Inger Mees use the term "Non-Regional Pronunciation" for what is often otherwise called RP, and reserve the term "Received Pronunciation" for the "upper-class speech of the twentieth century". Received Pronunciation has sometimes been called "Oxford English", as it used to be the accent of most members of
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#17328490599511584-457: Is common throughout many English dialects, though the phonetic realisation of e.g. [i] rather than [ɪ] (a phenomenon called happy -tensing ) is not as universal. According to Jane Setter , the typical pronunciation of the short [u] is a weakly rounded near-close near-back rounded vowel [ ʊ̜ ] . The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP. The vowel /ɔə/ (as in door , boar ) had largely merged with /ɔː/ by
1656-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have
1728-557: Is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the South of England", and alternative names such as "Standard Southern British" have been used. Despite RP's historic high social prestige in Britain, being seen as the accent of those with power, money, and influence, it may be perceived negatively by some as being associated with undeserved, or accidental, privilege and as
1800-427: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation ( RP )
1872-543: Is known as the tower – tire , tower – tar and tire – tar mergers . There are differing opinions as to whether /æ/ in the BATH lexical set can be considered RP. The pronunciations with /ɑː/ are invariably accepted as RP. The English Pronouncing Dictionary does not admit /æ/ in BATH words and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists them with a § marker of non-RP status. John Wells wrote in
1944-404: Is pronounced by some RP speakers in a noticeably different way when it occurs before /l/ , if that consonant is syllable-final and not followed by a vowel (the context in which /l/ is pronounced as a "dark l"). The realization of /əʊ/ in this case begins with a more back, rounded and sometimes more open vowel quality; it may be transcribed as [ɔʊ] or [ɒʊ] . It is likely that the backness of
2016-401: Is reinforced by a number of other differences, with the result that the two of consonants can clearly be distinguished even in the presence of devoicing of voiced sounds: As a result, some authors prefer to use the terms fortis and lenis in place of voiceless and voiced . However, the latter are traditional and in more frequent usage. The voiced dental fricative ( /ð/ ) is more often
2088-460: Is the British English accent regarded as the standard one, carrying the highest social prestige , since as late as the very early 20th century. Language scholars have long disagreed on topics such as: the exact definition of RP, how geographically neutral it is, how many speakers there are, the nature and classification of its sub-varieties, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, how
2160-457: Is the fifth most common letter in the English language . The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced / aɪ / and always written with a capital letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase ⟨i⟩ acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing : The capitalized "I" first showed up about 1250 in
2232-638: Is too low to correlate meaningfully with the usual factors", having found only two speakers (both having attended boarding schools in the south) who consistently used /ɑː/ . Jack Windsor Lewis has noted that the Oxford Dictionary's position has changed several times on whether to include short /æ/ within its prescribed pronunciation. The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names uses only /ɑː/ , but its author, Graham Pointon, has stated on his blog that he finds both variants to be acceptable in place names. Some research has concluded that many people in
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2304-461: Is used to represent the sound /i/ or, more rarely, /ɪ/ . In the International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨ i ⟩ represents the close front unrounded vowel . The small caps ⟨ ɪ ⟩ represents the near-close near-front unrounded vowel . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes ,
2376-480: The /æ/ sound, as in land , with a vowel close to [ɛ] , so that land would sound similar to a present-day pronunciation of lend . RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English , but recordings show that even Queen Elizabeth II shifted her pronunciation over the course of her reign, ceasing to use an [ɛ] -like vowel in words like land . The change in RP may be observed in the home of " BBC English ". The BBC accent of
2448-680: The Golden Triangle of universities, namely London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the public schools that fed them, such as Eton , Harrow and Rugby . In 1922, the BBC selected RP as its broadcasting standard, citing its being widely understood globally as a reason. According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), "the correct term is 'the Received Pronunciation'. The word 'received' conveys its original meaning of 'accepted' or 'approved', as in ' received wisdom'." Some linguists have used
2520-499: The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary , compiled by John C. Wells (using the name "Received Pronunciation"), and Clive Upton 's Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English , (now republished as The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English ). Pronunciation forms an essential component of language learning and teaching; a model accent is necessary for learners to aim at, and to act as
2592-448: The North of England have a dislike of the /ɑː/ vowel in BATH words. A. F. Gupta wrote, "Many of the northerners were noticeably hostile to /ɡrɑːs/ , describing it as 'comical', 'snobbish', 'pompous' or even 'for morons'." On the subject, K. M. Petyt wrote that several respondents "positively said that they did not prefer the long-vowel form or that they really detested it or even that it
2664-529: The University of Oxford . The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association uses the name "Standard Southern British". Page 4 reads: Standard Southern British (where 'Standard' should not be taken as implying a value judgment of 'correctness') is the modern equivalent of what has been called 'Received Pronunciation' ('RP'). It is an accent of the south east of England which operates as
2736-484: The 1950s is distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is used for comic effect in programmes wishing to satirise 1950s social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr. Cholmondley-Warner" sketches. A few illustrative examples of changes in RP during the 20th century and early 21st are given below. A more comprehensive list (using
2808-641: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c. 3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c. 1800 BCE , representing
2880-758: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c. 900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet
2952-522: The RP vowel system. He also argues against including other French vowels on the grounds that not many British speakers succeed in distinguishing the vowels in bon and banc , or in rue and roue . However, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary draws a distinction between /ɒ̃/ (there rendered as /ɔ̃ː/ ) and the unrounded /ɑ̃ː/ of banc for a total of four nasal vowels. Not all reference sources use
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3024-590: The Second World War RP has played a much smaller role in broadcast speech. RP remains the accent most often heard in the speech of announcers and newsreaders on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and in some TV channels, but non-RP accents are now more widely encountered. Most English dictionaries published in Britain (including the Oxford English Dictionary ) now give phonetically transcribed RP pronunciations for all words. Pronunciation dictionaries represent
3096-534: The Second World War, and increasingly since the 1960s, a wider acceptance of regional English varieties has taken hold in education and public life. Nonetheless, surveys from 1969 to 2022 consistently show that RP is perceived as the most prestigious accent of English in the United Kingdom. In 2022, 25% of British adults reported being mocked for their regional accent at work, and 46% in social situations. In
3168-483: The Second World War, and the vowel /ʊə/ (as in poor , tour ) has more recently merged with /ɔː/ as well among most speakers, although the sound /ʊə/ is still found in conservative speakers, and in less common words such as boor . See CURE – FORCE merger . More recently /ɛə/ has become a pure long vowel /ɛː/ , as explained above. /ɪə/ is increasingly pronounced as a monophthong [ɪː] , although without merging with any existing vowels. The diphthong /əʊ/
3240-619: The accent has changed over time, and even its name. The study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of Standard British English , such as vocabulary , grammar , and style , are not considered. The accent has changed, or its traditional users have changed their accents, to such a degree over the last century that many of its early 20th-century traditions of transcription and analysis have become outdated or are no longer considered evidence-based by linguists . Still, these traditions continue to be commonly taught and used, for instance in language education , and
3312-399: The consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century. In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase ⟨I⟩ may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter L , 'l', the vertical bar character '|', or the digit one '1'. In serifed typefaces, the capital form of the letter has both a baseline and a cap height serif, while the lowercase L generally has
3384-724: The correct pronunciation and other aspects of broadcast language. The Committee proved unsuccessful and was dissolved after the Second World War . While the BBC did advise its speakers on pronunciation, there was never a formalised official BBC pronunciation standard. A notable departure from the use of RP came with the Yorkshire-born newsreader Wilfred Pickles during the Second World War; his accent allowing listeners to more clearly distinguish BBC broadcasts from German propaganda, though Pickles had modified his accent to be closer to RP. Since
3456-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage
3528-424: The diphthong onset is the result of allophonic variation caused by the raising of the back of the tongue for the /l/ . If the speaker has "l-vocalization" the /l/ is realized as a back rounded vowel, which again is likely to cause backing and rounding in a preceding vowel as coarticulation effects. This phenomenon has been discussed in several blogs by John C. Wells . In the recording included in this article
3600-622: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩
3672-522: The early days of British broadcasting speakers of English origin almost universally used RP. The first director-general of the BBC , Lord Reith , encouraged the use of a 'BBC accent' because it was a "style or quality of English which would not be laughed at in any part of the country". He distinguished the BBC accent from the 'Oxford accent', to which he was "vehemently opposed". In 1926 the BBC established an Advisory Committee on Spoken English with distinguished experts, including Daniel Jones , to advise on
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#17328490599513744-442: The former is the uppercase counterpart of ɪ and the latter is the counterpart of 'i'. In Modern English spelling , ⟨i⟩ represents several different sounds, either the diphthong / aɪ / ("long" ⟨i⟩ ) as in kite , the short / ɪ / as in bill , or the ⟨ee⟩ sound / iː / in the last syllable of machine . The diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through
3816-463: The great public boarding-schools" and which conveyed no information about that speaker's region of origin before attending the school. An 1891 teacher's handbook stated, "It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed". Nevertheless, in the 19th century some British prime ministers, such as William Ewart Gladstone , still spoke with some regional features. Opinions differ over
3888-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and
3960-512: The letter's pronunciation in open syllables . In the Phoenician alphabet , the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative ( /ʕ/ ) in Egyptian , but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English " y es") by Semites because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent /i/ , the close front unrounded vowel , mainly in foreign words. The Greeks adopted
4032-476: The long or the short group of vowel phonemes) but their length is influenced by their context: in particular, they are shortened if a voiceless ( fortis ) consonant follows in the syllable, so that, for example, the vowel in 'bat' [bæʔt] is shorter than the vowel in 'bad' [bæd] . The process is known as pre-fortis clipping . Thus phonologically short vowels in one context can be phonetically longer than phonologically long vowels in another context. For example,
4104-592: The name "BBC Pronunciation". The term 'The Queen's English' has also been used by some writers. The phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis frequently criticised the name "Received Pronunciation" in his blog: he has called it "invidious", a "ridiculously archaic, parochial and question-begging term" and noted that American scholars find the term "quite curious". He used the term "General British" (to parallel " General American ") in his 1970s publication of A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of American and British English and in subsequent publications. The name "General British"
4176-524: The name "General British" in place of "RP") is given in Gimson's Pronunciation of English . RP RP A number of cases can be identified where changes in the pronunciation of individual words, or small groups of words, have taken place. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association regularly publishes "Illustrations of the IPA" which present an outline of the phonetics of a particular language or accent. It
4248-513: The northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology . Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn't become established in the south of England until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time). Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus "avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts." In many languages' orthographies, ⟨i⟩
4320-537: The phrase "fold his cloak" contains examples of the /əʊ/ diphthong in the two different contexts. The onset of the pre- /l/ diphthong in "fold" is slightly more back and rounded than that in "cloak". RP also possesses the triphthongs /aɪə/ as in tire , /aʊə/ as in tower , /əʊə/ as in lower , /eɪə/ as in layer and /ɔɪə/ as in loyal . There are different possible realisations of these items: in slow, careful speech they may be pronounced as two syllables with three distinct vowel qualities in succession, or as
4392-684: The plosives /t/ and /d/ often have no audible release utterance-finally, and voiced consonants are partly or completely devoiced (as in [b̥æd̥] ); thus the perceptual distinction between pairs of words such as 'bad' and 'bat', or 'seed' and 'seat' rests mostly on vowel length (though the presence or absence of glottal reinforcement provides an additional cue). Unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralised than stressed ones. In unstressed syllables occurring before vowels and in final position, contrasts between long and short high vowels are neutralised and short [i] and [u] occur (e.g. happy [ˈhæpi] , throughout [θɹuˈaʊʔt] ). The neutralisation
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#17328490599514464-456: The proportion of Britons who speak RP. Trudgill estimated 3% in 1974, but that rough estimate has been questioned by J. Windsor Lewis . Upton notes higher estimates of 5% (Romaine, 2000) and 10% (Wells, 1982) but refers to these as "guesstimates" not based on robust research. The claim that RP is non-regional is disputed, since it is most commonly found in London and the southeast of England. It
4536-406: The same syllable, as in "spot" or "stop". When a sonorant /l/ , /r/ , /w/ , or /j/ follows, this aspiration is indicated by partial devoicing of the sonorant . /r/ is a fricative when devoiced. Syllable final /p/ , /t/ , /tʃ/ , and /k/ may be either preceded by a glottal stop ( glottal reinforcement ) or, in the case of /t/ , fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before
4608-495: The same system of transcription. Clive Upton devised a modified system for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993), changing five symbols from the traditional Gimson system, and this is now used in many other Oxford University Press dictionaries; the differences are shown in the table below. Linguist Geoff Lindsey has argued that the system of transcription for RP has become outdated and has proposed
4680-663: The smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,
4752-417: The term "RP" while expressing reservations about its suitability. The Cambridge-published English Pronouncing Dictionary (aimed at those learning English as a foreign language) uses the phrase " BBC Pronunciation", on the basis that the name "Received Pronunciation" is "archaic" and that BBC News presenters no longer suggest high social class and privilege to their listeners. Other writers have also used
4824-501: The term had been used much earlier by P. S. Du Ponceau in 1818 and the Oxford English Dictionary cites quotations back to about 1710. A similar term, received standard, was coined by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927. The early phonetician Alexander John Ellis used both terms interchangeably, but with a much broader definition than Jones's, saying, "There is no such thing as a uniform educated pron. of English, and rp. and rs.
4896-542: The use of RP as a convenient umbrella term remains popular. The tradition of Received Pronunciation is usually credited to the British phonetician Daniel Jones . In the first edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), he named the accent " Public School Pronunciation"; for the second edition in 1926 he wrote: "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation, for want of a better term." However,
4968-457: The vowel called "long" /iː/ in 'reach' /riːtʃ/ (which ends with a voiceless consonant) may be shorter than the vowel called "short" /ɪ/ in the word 'ridge' /rɪdʒ/ (which ends with a voiced consonant). Wiik, cited in ( Cruttenden 2014 ), published durations of English vowels with a mean value of 172 ms for short vowels before voiced consonants but a mean value of 165 ms for long vowels preceding voiceless consonants. In natural speech ,
5040-508: Was incorrect". Mark Newbrook has assigned this phenomenon the name "conscious rejection", and has cited the BATH vowel as "the main instance of conscious rejection of RP" in his research in West Wirral . John Wells has argued that, as educated British speakers often attempt to pronounce French names in a French way, there is a case for including /ɒ̃/ (as in bon ), and /æ̃/ and /ɜ̃ː/ (as in vingt-et-un ), as marginal members of
5112-504: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in
5184-483: Was used by almost everyone who was from clearly north of the isogloss for BATH words. She wrote, "There is no justification for the claims by Wells and Mugglestone that this is a sociolinguistic variable in the north, though it is a sociolinguistic variable on the areas on the border [the isogloss between north and south]". In a study of speech in West Yorkshire, K. M. Petyt wrote that "the amount of /ɑː/ usage
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