Variation and Change in Modern Received Pronunciation: Understanding interactions between private education and regional accent variation

Abstract

In this project I approach Received Pronunciation (henceforth RP) from a sociolinguistic standpoint, using three groups of recorded speakers to understand the potential for regional variation. CoRP-NE are speakers privately educated in the North East and they are compared to CoRP-SE (speakers privately educated in the South East, canonically the home of RP) and DECTE (state educated Tyneside speakers from Corrigan et al. 2012), as baselines for regional vs. non-regional behaviour. Trudgill (2008) suggests that innovations arise in RP as a process of change from below where new variants enter the variety from working class south-eastern accents before diffusing across the country. Alongside comparing synchronic variables, the life cycle of phonological processes (Bermúdez-Otero, 2015) is used to understanding the nature of a diffuse speech community and the regionality of RP within this framework. I find that regional vs. non-regional behaviour depends on the variable. In the FOOT-STRUT split, male CoRP-NE speakers behave regionally, not producing a split, whereas female speakers have a different pattern to either the regional or ‘RP’ version, creating a split with a STRUT vowel different to the CoRP-SE version. In the TRAP-BATH split CoRP-NE speakers behave broadly regionally with no split in vowel frontness. GOAT allophony is more complex. The CoRP-NE speakers show a similar GOAT vowel and GOATGOAL split in the monosyllabic context to the CoRP-SE speakers (DECTE speakers show a monophthong with no split), demonstrating non-regional behaviour. However, in analysis the morphological conditioning of the pre-/l/ position of the GOAT vowel, I found that the CoRP-NE speakers show a different pattern to the CoRP-SE speakers, reaching stage 3 of the life cycle of phonological processes. The pattern appears to be either a simplification of the rule from the diffusion process, or a further progression of the change moving through the grammar. The data cannot show which of these is the case but either case demonstrates difference to the non-regional pattern. Overall, results show that speakers in the CoRP-NE category are a unique speech community. There are two possible conclusions from these results. The first is that there is a non-regional accent in the North East but the speaker group recorded here is not of a high enough social class to have it. This implies that the non-regional variety can only be found in a higher social class group in the North East than in the South East. The second possible conclusion is that if a non-regional accent ever did exist, it does not any more.