6 : SOCIOPHONOLOGY1.1 IntroductionW

6 : SOCIOPHONOLOGY

1.1 Introduction

While the sociolinguist studies all aspects of language variation, sociophonology is that aspect of the discipline which studies only those differences of pronunciation which are perceived as socially significant. These are differences which are unlikely to be part of the idiolect of only one speaker, but rather they are shared by groups of speakers, and may or may not coexist with other features of a regional or social dialect in its spoken form, such as distinctive grammatical forms, lexis, and idiom.“Pronunciation” is used here as a broad term which in this context includes other features such as intonation and “articulatory set.”

It is a commonplace of linguistics that spoken language is more variable than written, and that variation in speech (aside from age and gender: see chapters 8 and 9) is a function of (a) region, (b) social group, and (c) situation. The speech forms of regional and social groups, in addition to the pronunciation of particular words in distinctive ways, are characterized by generalized sound features whose patterns are distinctive of each such group. To take the example of the dialects known respectively as British English and American English, most speakers of the former pronounce the two particular words leisure and lever as [3le45] and [3li:v5], but in American English the vowel values in the first syllable of each of the two words are reversed. In addition to such examples, the standard varieties of British and American English are distinguished by a whole pattern of regularized differences, including an important consonantal difference – the need in standard AmE to realize post-vocalic [r] – and many systematic vowel differences such as AmE [æ] for BrE [a:] in words like grass, path, plant; AmE [a:] for [;] in words like hot, wash; and many more. It is the complex of these latter specific consonantal and vowel features which constitutes what we call accent, and which enables an individual speaker's accent to be identified as either standard British English or American English, or as being predominantly one or the other. In Britain and the USA, as in most countries, accent varieties are commonly described in terms of variation from or approximation to the sounds of a standard variety of accent (e.g., BrE, AmE, etc.).




1.2 Accent standardization: The case of RP

The emergence of standard varieties of language, which in Western Europe took place between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, is referred to elsewhere in this book (chapter 13). The most substantial contributory factors were the rise first of a print culture and then of nation-states with mass education systems, bringing in their train vastly increased access to mass media of the written and later the spoken word. These changes were accompanied by the greatly accelerated geographical and social mobility associated with industrialization and urban agglomeration. Written forms of the language were the first to be standardized, with spoken standards usually following a considerable distance behind.

To take the case of England, the written standard developed from the use, in government records from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, of the East Midlands dialect associated with the region around Cambridge, London, and Oxford, and this variety was widely diffused by printing after 1476. The spoken version of this dialect soon acquired influence as a model, and by Shakespeare's time was being taught as such by schoolmasters. The eighteenth-century passion for linguistic prescription and codification – partly a function of greater social mobility – included a marked concern with the “correct” pronunciation of words.

The wider diffusion of this spoken standard, beyond the ranks of the upper social classes (and of the more educated members of the population) within a 60-mile radius of London, had to await the development from around 1870 onwards of an interacting system of boarding schools, known quaintly as “public schools” (i.e., exclusive private schools), attendance at one of which was normally preceded by attendance, from around age 7, at what in Britain is called a preparatory (“prep”) school (Honey, 1977; Leinster-Mackay, 1984). Such attendance became after that date the expectation of all, and the actual experience of most, of the sons of the upper, upper-middle, and professional classes in England (and indeed Britain), and by 1900 of many of their daughters also, throughout ten very impressionable years of their lives. Moreover, thanks partly to the success of the products of these schools in dominating every area of British social life, and also because of an enormous popular literature based on this kind of schooling, the influence of this model of school life reached down into the humblest day school for the lower classes, so that the linguistic forms which the public schools promoted, and especially their standardized English accent, acquired general prestige throughout British society (Honey, 1988b). One consequence of all this was that, while upper-class families in the early part of the nineteenth century still spoke with accents strongly influenced by regional forms, after about 1870 it was rare for any member of the upper classes to speak with any traces of a regional accent. Another curious result was that, because the criteria for being a public school were fuzzy and no one knew exactly which schools counted, the mere fact of speaking with an RP accent came to imply that its speaker must be a “public school man,” with all the social and occupational advantages which that status implied.

In the twentieth century the responsibility for the diffusion of the RP accent passed from the preparatory and public schools to the new medium of radio (established in 1922, in an organization where linguistic forms were closely controlled) and later to TV, which first reached a mass audience in the 1950s. This accent, originally labelled Public School Pronunciation by the phonetician Daniel Jones, has come to be known since 1926 as “Received Pronunciation” (RP), a term which uses the older sense of “received” as “generally accepted as authentic, especially among those qualified to know,” as in “received opinion” (Honey, 1985).

1.3 Two forms of RP

The connotations of prestige which attach to British English RP must not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that this blanket term itself embraces two forms of accent, which can conveniently be labelled as “marked” and “unmarked” RP, where markings are indicators of special social privilege or pretension. While neither form gives any clue as to the speaker's region of origin, unmarked RP is the mainstream variety, conventionally associated with BBC newsreaders and also with schoolteachers, doctors, and secretaries. Marked RP is associated with members (except nowadays the younger ones) of the royal family, with the aristocracy, and with an older generation of senior army and naval officers and university teachers at Cambridge and Oxford. Among many characteristic features, the pronunciation [N] in words like often, cross, and cloth most readily identifies this variety of the RP accent to native speakers who hear it, as does the tendency to give words like really and rarely the same pronunciation, or to move (with Prince Charles) abite the hice. As with all accents, marked RP often involves a distinctive articulatory setting (see Honikman, 1964) which in turn gives its speakers a distinctive voice quality (see Laver, 1980). Originally part of a full British upper-class dialect or sociolect (since perhaps the sixteenth century) with other distinctive lexical and idiomatic features (Honey, 1989: 41), it used to confer special prestige on its speakers and opened many doors to jobs, to commissions in the armed forces, and in the marriage market. Until very recently its acquisition justified investment for one's children in especially expensive forms of education, at the most socially prestigious “public” schools like Eton and Harrow (and comparable schools for girls), followed by Cambridge or Oxford. It must further be noted that, beyond the groups of its own speakers, it could also arouse a degree of ridicule, and is now less common. Outside England (and especially the south of England), the unmarked form of RP may itself be regarded as hyperlectal (i.e., carrying overtones of social pretentiousness outside its own group of speakers), and this is also true for Scotland (and Scottish English has other hyperlectal forms of its own) and for former British possessions overseas like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where a distinctive local accent has become established whose most educated variety is the effective model in the educational system and the preferred form for radio and TV newsreaders. (On the relative status of RP in Nigeria and in Hong Kong, compare Ufumata, 1990, with Bolton and Kwok, 1990.) In Australia, a vast country with remarkably little regional accent variation, it has been estimated that about a third of Australians speak with what is known as a broad Australian accent, just over half with a general Australian accent,
and about one tenth use cultivated Australian, associated especially with education (McCrum et al., 1986: 294). In South Africa, accent features usually make it possible to distinguish among speakers of standard English as between mother-tongue English-speakers, Afrikaans-speakers, mother-tongue speakers of African languages, and “coloreds” (persons of mixed race), and often also South Africans of Indian descent.

These two forms of the standard accent of British English now coexist with a great variety of local accents which are the successors of the mass of local speech forms of medieval Britain. Readers of the classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847) are confronted by many baffling utterances such as “What is he abaht, girt

Results (Malay) 1:

6: SOCIOPHONOLOGY1.1 pengenalanManakala sociolinguist dalam pengajian segala aspek perbezaan bahasa, sociophonology adalah bahawa aspek disiplin yang pengajian hanya mereka perbezaan sebutan yang dianggap penting seperti sosial. Ini adalah perbezaan yang tidak mungkin menjadi sebahagian daripada idiolect di-Pertua hanya satu, tetapi sebaliknya mereka dikongsi oleh sekumpulan Penutur, dan mungkin atau mungkin tidak wujud bersama-sama dengan ciri-ciri dialek Daerah atau sosial dalam bentuk pertuturan, seperti bentuk tatabahasa yang tersendiri, lexis, dan peribahasa yang lain. " Sebutan"digunakan sebagai istilah umum yang dalam konteks ini merangkumi ciri-ciri lain seperti Intonasi dan"articulatory set." It is a commonplace of linguistics that spoken language is more variable than written, and that variation in speech (aside from age and gender: see chapters 8 and 9) is a function of (a) region, (b) social group, and (c) situation. The speech forms of regional and social groups, in addition to the pronunciation of particular words in distinctive ways, are characterized by generalized sound features whose patterns are distinctive of each such group. To take the example of the dialects known respectively as British English and American English, most speakers of the former pronounce the two particular words leisure and lever as [3le45] and [3li:v5], but in American English the vowel values in the first syllable of each of the two words are reversed. In addition to such examples, the standard varieties of British and American English are distinguished by a whole pattern of regularized differences, including an important consonantal difference – the need in standard AmE to realize post-vocalic [r] – and many systematic vowel differences such as AmE [æ] for BrE [a:] in words like grass, path, plant; AmE [a:] for [;] in words like hot, wash; and many more. It is the complex of these latter specific consonantal and vowel features which constitutes what we call accent, and which enables an individual speaker's accent to be identified as either standard British English or American English, or as being predominantly one or the other. In Britain and the USA, as in most countries, accent varieties are commonly described in terms of variation from or approximation to the sounds of a standard variety of accent (e.g., BrE, AmE, etc.).1.2 loghat Standard: kes Mata GanjaranKemunculan standard jenis bahasa, yang di Eropah Barat berlaku fifteenth itu hingga berabad-abad Kesembilan belas, dirujukkan di tempat lain dalam buku ini (Bab 13). Faktor-faktor penyumbang utama Tempahan ketara adalah kebangkitan pertama budaya cetak dan kemudian nation-states dengan sistem pendidikan massa, membawa masuk Kereta Api mereka jauh meningkat akses kepada media massa bertulis dan kemudian perkataan yang dituturkan. Perubahan ini turut diiringi oleh banyak dipercepatkan geografi dan sosial mobiliti berkaitan dengan perindustrian dan pengumpulan bandar. Bentuk bertulis Bahasa merupakan yang pertama dipiawaikan, dengan standard yang dituturkan biasanya berikutan jarak yang agak besar di belakang. Untuk mengambil kes England, standard bertulis dibentuk daripada penggunaan, rekod-rekod kerajaan dari fifteenth pertengahan abad ke, dari dialek East Midlands yang dikaitkan dengan rantau ini sekitar Cambridge, London, dan Oxford, dan varieti ini telah tersebar secara meluas oleh percetakan selepas 1476. Versi pertuturan dialek ini tidak lama lagi memperolehi pengaruh sebagai model, dan masa Shakespeare yang diajar oleh itu oleh schoolmasters. Keghairahan abad kelapan belas preskripsi linguistik dan kodifikasi – sebahagian fungsi mobiliti sosial yang lebih besar – termasuk satu kebimbangan yang ketara dengan kaedah sebutan yang "betul" kata-kata. The wider diffusion of this spoken standard, beyond the ranks of the upper social classes (and of the more educated members of the population) within a 60-mile radius of London, had to await the development from around 1870 onwards of an interacting system of boarding schools, known quaintly as “public schools” (i.e., exclusive private schools), attendance at one of which was normally preceded by attendance, from around age 7, at what in Britain is called a preparatory (“prep”) school (Honey, 1977; Leinster-Mackay, 1984). Such attendance became after that date the expectation of all, and the actual experience of most, of the sons of the upper, upper-middle, and professional classes in England (and indeed Britain), and by 1900 of many of their daughters also, throughout ten very impressionable years of their lives. Moreover, thanks partly to the success of the products of these schools in dominating every area of British social life, and also because of an enormous popular literature based on this kind of schooling, the influence of this model of school life reached down into the humblest day school for the lower classes, so that the linguistic forms which the public schools promoted, and especially their standardized English accent, acquired general prestige throughout British society (Honey, 1988b). One consequence of all this was that, while upper-class families in the early part of the nineteenth century still spoke with accents strongly influenced by regional forms, after about 1870 it was rare for any member of the upper classes to speak with any traces of a regional accent. Another curious result was that, because the criteria for being a public school were fuzzy and no one knew exactly which schools counted, the mere fact of speaking with an RP accent came to imply that its speaker must be a “public school man,” with all the social and occupational advantages which that status implied. Dalam abad kedua puluh tanggungjawab untuk penyebaran loghat Mata Ganjaran lulus dari sekolah-sekolah awam dan persediaan untuk medium baru radio (ditubuhkan pada tahun 1922, dalam sesebuah organisasi di mana bentuk-bentuk linguistik yang rapat dikawal) dan kemudian ke TV, pertama yang mencapai penonton yang besar-besaran pada 1950-an. Ini loghat, asalnya dilabelkan sebutan sekolah awam oleh phonetician Daniel Jones, telah datang yang dikenali sejak tahun 1926 sebagai "Lafaz diterima" (mata ganjaran), satu istilah yang menggunakan rasa lebih tua "menerima" sebagai "secara amnya diterima sebagai sahih, terutamanya di kalangan orang-orang yang layak untuk mengetahui," seperti "diterima pendapat" (madu, 1985).1.3 dua bentuk mata ganjaranThe connotations of prestige which attach to British English RP must not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that this blanket term itself embraces two forms of accent, which can conveniently be labelled as “marked” and “unmarked” RP, where markings are indicators of special social privilege or pretension. While neither form gives any clue as to the speaker's region of origin, unmarked RP is the mainstream variety, conventionally associated with BBC newsreaders and also with schoolteachers, doctors, and secretaries. Marked RP is associated with members (except nowadays the younger ones) of the royal family, with the aristocracy, and with an older generation of senior army and naval officers and university teachers at Cambridge and Oxford. Among many characteristic features, the pronunciation [N] in words like often, cross, and cloth most readily identifies this variety of the RP accent to native speakers who hear it, as does the tendency to give words like really and rarely the same pronunciation, or to move (with Prince Charles) abite the hice. As with all accents, marked RP often involves a distinctive articulatory setting (see Honikman, 1964) which in turn gives its speakers a distinctive voice quality (see Laver, 1980). Originally part of a full British upper-class dialect or sociolect (since perhaps the sixteenth century) with other distinctive lexical and idiomatic features (Honey, 1989: 41), it used to confer special prestige on its speakers and opened many doors to jobs, to commissions in the armed forces, and in the marriage market. Until very recently its acquisition justified investment for one's children in especially expensive forms of education, at the most socially prestigious “public” schools like Eton and Harrow (and comparable schools for girls), followed by Cambridge or Oxford. It must further be noted that, beyond the groups of its own speakers, it could also arouse a degree of ridicule, and is now less common. Outside England (and especially the south of England), the unmarked form of RP may itself be regarded as hyperlectal (i.e., carrying overtones of social pretentiousness outside its own group of speakers), and this is also true for Scotland (and Scottish English has other hyperlectal forms of its own) and for former British possessions overseas like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where a distinctive local accent has become established whose most educated variety is the effective model in the educational system and the preferred form for radio and TV newsreaders. (On the relative status of RP in Nigeria and in Hong Kong, compare Ufumata, 1990, with Bolton and Kwok, 1990.) In Australia, a vast country with remarkably little regional accent variation, it has been estimated that about a third of Australians speak with what is known as a broad Australian accent, just over half with a general Australian accent,and about one tenth use cultivated Australian, associated especially with education (McCrum et al., 1986: 294). In South Africa, accent features usually make it possible to distinguish among speakers of standard English as between mother-tongue English-speakers, Afrikaans-speakers, mother-tongue speakers of African languages, and “coloreds” (persons of mixed race), and often also South Africans of Indian descent. These two forms of the standard accent of British English now coexist with a great variety of local accents which are the successors of the mass of local speech forms of medieval Britain. Readers of the classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847) are confronted by many baffling utterances such as “What is he abaht, girt

Results (Malay) 2:

6: SOCIOPHONOLOGY 1.1 Pengenalan Walaupun kajian sociolinguist semua aspek variasi bahasa, sociophonology ialah aspek disiplin yang mengkaji hanya perbezaan sebutan yang dianggap sebagai penting dari segi sosial. Ini adalah perbezaan yang tidak mungkin menjadi sebahagian daripada idiolect hanya satu pembesar suara, tetapi sebaliknya ia dikongsi oleh kumpulan penutur, dan mungkin atau mungkin tidak wujud bersama-sama dengan ciri-ciri lain dialek serantau atau sosial dalam bentuk pertuturan, seperti tersendiri bentuk tatabahasa, lexis, dan simpulan bahasa. "Sebutan" digunakan di sini sebagai satu istilah yang luas yang dalam konteks ini termasuk ciri-ciri lain seperti intonasi dan "set articulatory." Ia adalah perkara biasa linguistik bahawa bahasa pertuturan adalah lebih berubah-ubah daripada bertulis, dan bahawa variasi dalam ucapan (selain daripada umur dan jantina: lihat bab 8 dan 9) adalah fungsi (a) kawasan, (b) kumpulan sosial, dan (c) keadaan. Bentuk-bentuk ucapan kumpulan serantau dan sosial, sebagai tambahan kepada sebutan perkataan tertentu dengan cara yang tersendiri, ciri-ciri ciri-ciri bunyi umum yang corak yang tersendiri setiap kumpulan tersebut. Untuk mengambil contoh dialek masing-masing dikenali sebagai British bahasa Inggeris dan bahasa Inggeris Amerika, kebanyakan penutur bekas menyebut percutian dua perkataan tertentu dan tuil sebagai [3le45] [3li: v5] dan, tetapi dalam bahasa Inggeris Amerika nilai vokal dalam yang pertama suku kata setiap dua kata telah dibalikkan. Selain contoh-contoh itu, jenis taraf Britain dan Amerika Syarikat English dibezakan oleh corak keseluruhan perbezaan dikemaskinikan, termasuk perbezaan konsonan penting - keperluan dalam standard Ame menyedari pasca dgn suara [r] - dan banyak perbezaan vokal sistematik seperti sebagai Ame [æ] untuk Bre [a:] dalam kata-kata seperti rumput, jalan, loji; Ame [a:] untuk [;] dalam kata-kata seperti panas, mencuci; dan banyak lagi. Ia adalah kompleks ini kedua tertentu ciri-konsonan dan vokal yang menjadi apa yang kita panggil loghat dan membolehkan aksen speaker individu untuk dikenal pasti sama ada standard British Bahasa Inggeris atau bahasa Inggeris Amerika, atau sebagai yang kebanyakannya satu atau yang lain. Di Britain dan Amerika Syarikat, seperti di kebanyakan negara, jenis loghat biasanya digambarkan dari segi kepelbagaian daripada atau anggaran kepada bunyi pelbagai taraf loghat (contohnya, BRE, ame, dll). 1.2 Accent penyeragaman: Kes RP Kemunculan jenis taraf bahasa, yang di Eropah Barat telah berlaku di antara kelima belas dan abad kesembilan belas, yang disebut di tempat lain dalam buku ini (bab 13). Yang paling besar faktor penyumbang ialah kenaikan pertama budaya cetak dan kemudian negara bangsa dengan sistem pendidikan massa, membawa kereta api mereka jauh meningkat akses kepada media massa dengan perkataan yang dituturkan yang bertulis dan kemudian. Perubahan ini telah disertai oleh mobiliti banyak mempercepatkan geografi dan sosial yang berkaitan dengan perindustrian dan aglomerasi bandar. Bentuk bertulis daripada bahasa yang sebelumnya telah diseragamkan, dengan standard yang diucapkan biasanya mengikut jarak yang agak jauh di belakang. Untuk mengambil kes England, standard bertulis yang dibangunkan daripada penggunaan, dalam rekod kerajaan dari pertengahan abad kelima belas dan seterusnya, daripada East Midlands dialek yang berkaitan dengan kawasan di sekitar Cambridge, London, dan Oxford, dan pelbagai ini secara meluas disebarkan melalui cetakan selepas 1476. Versi diperkatakan dialek ini tidak lama lagi pengaruh yang diperolehi sebagai model, dan pada masa Shakespeare yang diajar sedemikian oleh schoolmasters . Semangat abad kelapan belas untuk preskripsi bahasa dan kodifikasi - sebahagiannya fungsi mobiliti sosial yang lebih besar - termasuk kebimbangan ketara dengan sebutan "betul" kata-kata. Penyebaran luas piawaian ini dituturkan, di luar barisan kelas-kelas sosial atas (dan daripada anggota yang lebih berpendidikan daripada penduduk) dalam radius 60 batu dari London, terpaksa menanti pembangunan dari seluruh 1870 dan seterusnya sistem berinteraksi sekolah-sekolah berasrama penuh, yang dikenali aneh sebagai "sekolah kerajaan" (iaitu, sekolah swasta eksklusif), kehadiran di salah satu daripada yang biasanya didahului oleh kehadiran, dari sekitar umur 7, apa di Britain dipanggil persediaan ("prep") sekolah (Madu, 1977; Leinster-Mackay, 1984). Kehadiran sebegitu selepas tarikh itu jangkaan semua, dan pengalaman sebenar yang paling, dari anak-anak atas, menengah atas, dan kelas profesional di England (dan sesungguhnya Britain), dan oleh 1900 dari banyak anak perempuan mereka juga, sepanjang sepuluh tahun sangat mudah terpengaruh kehidupan mereka. Lebih-lebih lagi, terima kasih sebahagiannya kepada kejayaan produk daripada sekolah-sekolah di mendominasi setiap bidang kehidupan sosial British, dan juga kerana sebuah sastera popular besar berdasarkan jenis ini persekolahan, pengaruh model ini hidup sekolah sampai ke dalam yang paling rendah sekolah hari untuk kelas yang lebih rendah, sehingga bentuk-bentuk linguistik yang sekolah-sekolah awam digalakkan, dan terutamanya loghat Inggeris yang standard mereka, memperoleh prestij umum di seluruh masyarakat Britain (Honey, 1988b). Satu akibat daripada semua ini adalah bahawa, sementara keluarga kelas atas pada awal abad kesembilan belas masih bercakap dengan aksen dipengaruhi oleh bentuk serantau, selepas kira-kira 1870 ia adalah jarang untuk mana-mana anggota kelas-kelas atasan untuk bercakap dengan apa-apa kesan loghat daerah. Satu lagi hasil ingin tahu adalah bahawa, kerana kriteria untuk menjadi sekolah awam adalah kabur dan tiada siapa yang tahu dengan tepat yang sekolah dikira, fakta semata-mata bercakap dengan loghat RP datang untuk membayangkan bahawa penceramah mesti menjadi "lelaki sekolah awam," dengan semua kelebihan sosial dan pekerjaan yang status yang tersirat. Pada abad kedua puluh tanggungjawab bagi penyebaran loghat RP lulus dari sekolah-sekolah persediaan dan orang ramai kepada medium baru radio (ditubuhkan pada tahun 1922, dalam sesebuah organisasi di mana bentuk-bentuk linguistik adalah rapat terkawal) dan kemudian ke TV, yang pertama mencapai khalayak ramai pada tahun 1950an. Loghat ini, pada asalnya diberi label Public School Pengucapan oleh ahli Fonetik Daniel Jones, telah datang yang dikenali sejak 1926 sebagai "Sebutan Diterima" (RP), satu istilah yang menggunakan akal yang lebih tua "menerima" sebagai "diterima umum sebagai sahih, terutamanya di kalangan mereka yang layak tahu, "seperti dalam" Pendapat yang diterima "(Madu, 1985). 1.3 Dua bentuk RP Konotasi prestij yang melampirkan ke British English RP tidak boleh, bagaimanapun, dibenarkan untuk mengaburi hakikat bahawa istilah selimut ini sendiri merangkumi dua bentuk loghat, yang dengan mudah boleh dilabelkan sebagai "ketara" dan "tidak bertanda" RP, di mana tanda-tanda adalah petunjuk keistimewaan sosial khas atau keinginan. Walaupun bentuk tidak memberikan apa-apa petunjuk tentang rantau orang yang bercakap asal, RP tidak bertanda adalah pelbagai yang arus perdana, konvensional yang berkaitan dengan BBC newsreaders dan juga dengan guru-guru sekolah, doktor, dan setiausaha. RP ketara dikaitkan dengan ahli-ahli (kecuali pada masa kini yang lebih muda) daripada keluarga diraja, dengan golongan bangsawan, dan dengan generasi yang lebih tua daripada tentera kanan dan pegawai tentera laut dan guru universiti di Cambridge dan Oxford. Di antara ciri-ciri, sebutan [N] dalam kata-kata seperti selalunya, salib, dan kain paling mudah mengenal pasti pelbagai ini loghat RP untuk orang-orang native yang mendengarnya, seperti juga kecenderungan untuk memberi kata-kata seperti benar-benar dan jarang sebutan yang sama, atau untuk bergerak (dengan Prince Charles) abite hice itu. Seperti semua aksen, RP ditanda sering melibatkan penetapan articulatory yang tersendiri (lihat Honikman, 1964) yang seterusnya memberikan pembesar kualiti suara tersendiri (lihat Laver, 1980). Pada asalnya sebahagian daripada British dialek kelas atasan penuh atau sociolect (sejak mungkin abad keenam belas) dengan ciri-ciri lain yang tersendiri leksikal dan simpulan bahasa (Honey, 1989: 41), ia digunakan untuk memberi prestij khas pada pembesar dan membuka banyak pintu kepada peluang pekerjaan, kepada komisen dalam angkatan tentera, dan dalam pasaran perkahwinan itu. Sehingga baru-baru pengambilalihan wajar pelaburan untuk kanak-kanak seseorang dalam bentuk terutama mahal pendidikan, di paling sosial berprestij sekolah "awam" seperti Eton dan Harrow (dan sekolah-sekolah yang setanding untuk perempuan), diikuti oleh Cambridge atau Oxford. Ia juga perlu diambil perhatian bahawa, di luar kumpulan penceramah sendiri, ia juga boleh menimbulkan tahap ejekan, dan kini kurang biasa. Di luar England (dan terutamanya di selatan England), bentuk yang tidak dikawal daripada RP sendiri boleh dianggap sebagai hyperlectal (iaitu, membawa berbau pretentiousness sosial di luar kumpulan sendiri penceramah), dan ini juga benar untuk Scotland (dan Scotland Bahasa Inggeris mempunyai bentuk hyperlectal lain yang tersendiri) dan bekas harta benda British di luar negara seperti Australia, New Zealand, Afrika Selatan, Hong Kong, dan Singapura, di mana loghat tempatan yang tersendiri telah menjadi ditubuhkan yang paling berpendidikan pelbagai adalah model yang berkesan dalam sistem dan pendidikan bentuk pilihan untuk radio dan TV newsreaders. (Pada status relatif RP di Nigeria dan di Hong Kong, membandingkan Ufumata, 1990, dengan Bolton dan Kwok, 1990.) Di Australia, sebuah negara yang luas dengan amat sedikit perbezaan loghat serantau, ia telah dianggarkan bahawa kira-kira satu pertiga daripada Australia bercakap dengan apa yang dikenali sebagai loghat Australia luas, hanya lebih setengah dengan loghat Australia umum, dan kira-kira satu kegunaan kesepuluh ditanam Australia, yang dikaitkan terutamanya dengan pendidikan (McCrum et al, 1986:. 294). Di Afrika Selatan, ciri-ciri loghat biasanya membuat ia mungkin untuk membezakan antara penutur standard bahasa Inggeris sebagai antara bahasa ibunda penutur bahasa Inggeris, Afrikaans-penceramah, penceramah bahasa ibunda bahasa Afrika, dan "berwarna" (orang-orang dari bangsa campuran), dan sering juga Afrika Selatan berketurunan India. Kedua-dua bentuk loghat standard bahasa Inggeris British kini wujud bersama dengan pelbagai jenis loghat tempatan yang merupakan pengganti jisim bentuk ucapan tempatan zaman pertengahan Britain. Pembaca novel klasik Wuthering Heights (1847) berhadapan dengan banyak ucapan-ucapan yang membingungkan seperti "Apa yang dia abaht, girt