Conservative General (Mainstream) Advanced (Contemporary)

spoken by older used by the BBC speakers used by the young people

generation, in certain and middle-aged people of exclusive social groups,

professions (the most popular) upper class, certain

and social groups professional circles

It is the advanced RP-form, that reflects the latest tendencies in pronunciation changes.

P.T. Trudgill also reveals Near-RP (“modified RP”) – a Southern accent spoken by teachers of English and university professors.

According to H. Giles’ survey, RP used to be associated with competent people of high social rank, but lacking some “humanly” characteristics (friendliness, sincerity etc.) that made them unpleasant to deal with. That is why nowadays there is a strong tendency to RP democratization and even young BBC announcers more and more often use “modern” sound combinations, which symbolizes the change of attitude to RP.

It has already been stated that national pronunciation standards are not fixed. They are subject to innovations and undergo constant changes that are due to various internal and external factors. The general tendency toward the simplification of languages over time may be traced. In phonetics it means the economy of the articulatory effort, which sometimes gives rise to homophones, which, in their turn, may lead to words confusion. These changes in the standard may affect both segmental phonemes and the prosodic system of the language and are mostly observed in the speech of the younger generation.

There is a strong tendency towards reducing the number of vowels and their shortening, “simplification” of consonant clusters, replacing /θ/ and /ð/ by /s/ and /z/ respectively, moderation of falls and rises in the intonation contours, gradual shifting from stress-based to syllable-based rhythmicality.

The most noticeable changes in RP are as follows:

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