The Year That Killed RP

I’d see the family right, but nobody else. Voiceover: This was the moment of the Angry Young Men, Kitchen Sink Drama. The beginning of the end for Received Pronunciation. –I don’t know what you’re talking about. As I showed in my last video, the most established symbols for standard British vowels were carefully chosen to represent an accent that today is so comically posh and old fashioned that it couldn't be used by a BBC newsreader. This is not typical. Language and speech are always changing

. Your grandparents don't sound like you. Younger Americans wonder why old Hollywood stars sound so different from them. But this British double whammy -- the shifting of practically the whole vowel system, and the old accent’s astonishingly rapid and drastic loss of prestige -- this demands explanation. It's a fascinating and dramatic story that’s essentially been covered up by the continued use of the old symbols, and the actual history may surprise you. So I'm happy to be partnering in this v

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of the 14-day free trial that's available by just clicking the link in the description. 1962 was the year that A. C. Gimson published his classic description of Received Pronunciation, RP, including his choice of vowel symbols that are still so familiar. But something drastic happened to RP almost immediately, as we can see just by comparing the 1962 first edition of Gimson’s book with the second edition published eight years later in 1970. In the first edition, published at thirty shillings, RP

was riding high. Gimson tells us that RP was “finally fixed, as the speech of the ruling class, through the conformist influence of the public schools of the nineteenth century.” Remember that here in the UK “public schools” are elite private schools. “Great prestige is still attached to this implicitly accepted social standard of pronunciation” and “it has become more widely known and accepted through the advent of radio… bringing the accent to the ears of the whole nation…” RP “excites least

prejudice of a regional kind” and indeed “the more marked characteristics of regional speech… are tending to be modified in the direction of RP, which is equated with the ‘correct’ pronunciation of English.” Now here’s the second edition, published in paperback at one pound fifty new pence. Right away on the back cover we find, “The eight years since this book’s first publication have produced a number of changes both in the study of pronunciation and in English pronunciation itself… The status

of Received Pronunciation has recently lost ground, especially among young people, and the sections dealing with RP have been rewritten to take account of this.” Golly. Inside, we’re told “it must be remarked that some members of the present younger generation reject RP because of its association with the ‘Establishment’ in the same way that they question the validity of other forms of traditional authority.” “For them a real or assumed regional or popular accent has a greater (and less committe

d) prestige.” “It is too early to predict whether such attitudes will have any lasting effect upon the future development of the pronunciation of English. But, if this tendency were to become more widespread and permanent, the result could be that, within the next century, RP might be so diluted that it could lose its historic identity and that a new standard with a wider popular and regional base would emerge.” So in 1962 we’re told that RP, the accent of the ruling class, is becoming ever more

accepted so that regional speech is being modified towards it, but by 1970, new tendencies have emerged which if they continue will blow RP away. You might well ask, What just happened? The answer of course, is the 1960s. Astute observers will have noted that the 1960s actually began before 1962. In 1960, British National Service ended and working class life hit the big screen with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the little screen with the start of Coronation Street, which is still going.

In 1961 the contraceptive pill was introduced on the National Health Service. But 1962 was a catalyst year of historical events and cultural innovations that would have life-changing repercussions for RP. It all began on October 5th 1962. One of my favourite trivia facts is that the exact same day, October the 5th, saw the release of both the first Beatles record Love Me Do, and the first James Bond film, Dr. No, launching the decade’s biggest crazes in both music and movies, and flouting conve

ntion in different but hugely popular ways. The nation and the world would soon be familiar with the Beatles’ Liverpool accents. And the North American producers of Dr No had been careful to cast Bond not with an RP speaker like his creator but with a working class Scot. Spies were the in thing. This was also the month of the Cuban missile crisis and it was the peak of the cold war. The same October John Vassall of the British Admiralty was convicted of spying for the Soviets, who were able to b

lackmail him because he was a gay man, then a crime. The Vassall affair was a big embarrassment for Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, but that was nothing compared with another scandal that was brewing at the very same time. Model and showgirl Christine Keeler was having simultaneous affairs with Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy, and John Profumo, a brigadier, a baron and the Secretary of State for War. Profumo: Under socialism, we shall have less freedom of expres

sion, even in parliament. There can be only one end to this. Communism. The story’s a lot more convoluted and lurid than that, and of course there’s a movie version, but the upshot was that Profumo admitted lying to everyone and had to resign, trashing the image of Macmillan, his government and to some extent the whole ruling class. The Profumo affair was fodder to the newly emboldened British press, and to the brand new wave of British satire. The satirical stage revue Beyond the Fringe appeare

d in 1960, the magazine Private Eye appeared in 1961, and in November 1962 the BBC launched the first TV satire show, That Was The Week That Was, a live late Saturday night sketch show. This is BBC television. In 1962, the Americans with their passionate love of communication between the free peoples of the world launched Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite. In 1962 the Americans exploded the Rainbow Bomb, designed to blot out communications all over the world. I think you secret

ly believe that the way to stop homosexuals being blackmailed into subversive acts is to change the law so that they can’t be. Well it had crossed my mind Sir. The only way to stop a homosexual being blackmailed is to stop him being a homosexual. Like the Beatles, Bond and Beyond the Fringe, it would soon be a hit in the US, where it was a forerunner of Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show et cetera. Live from New York. For the first time the British public had the experience of seeing and hearin

g the Establishment mocked. Even, or especially, the Prime Minister. Now let’s see, what year are we in? 18…, no, 1962. Now Macmillan, he’s under a cloud, and why’s he under a cloud? Because of the decline of the Tory image. A bit of rain… 1963 brought down Macmillan as well as Profumo, and the next year Britain got a state-educated Merseysider as Prime Minister, in fact he and I went to the same school. Thank you very much for giving us this silver heart. But I still think you should have given

one to good old Mr Wilson. Under Harold Wilson’s Labour government theatre censorship was abolished, gay men were decriminalized, public outcry over the wrongful execution of Timothy Evans (there’s a movie about that) led to the abolition of the death penalty, steam trains were phased out, colour TV was phased in, and it was decided to decimalise the currency. This whirlwind of social and cultural change had phonetic consequences. And it wasn't just an acceleration in the normal tendency of lan

guage to develop over time, or just an unusually extensive set of vowel shifts. In a crucial way, it represented a fully fledged reversal or inversion of values. The key concept here is what Gimson called advanced RP. In 1962, Gimson distinguished three types of RP: general, conservative and advanced. Conservative RP, as you might expect, was spoken by the older generation. It was the RP of the earlier 20th century, and it included that back /ou/ vowel which was already sounding dated by 1962, a

nd the symbol for which Gimson updated, to /əʊ/. And, also as you might expect, advanced RP was the speech of the young, and represented the likely future of the accent, the way things were probably headed. “Advanced pronunciations… may well indicate the way in which the RP system is developing, and be adopted in the future as general RP”. But just look at who these young speakers were, according to Gimson, and what they sounded like! He tells us that advanced RP forms are “used by young people

of exclusive social groups – mostly of the upper classes, but also, for prestige value, in certain professional circles. In its most exaggerated variety, this advanced RP would usually be judged ‘affected’ by other RP speakers, in the same way that all RP types are liable to be considered affected by those who use unmodified regional speech.” Affected by the way means artificial, pretentious, designed to impress. So let’s just get this right. In 1962, Gimson is telling us that the way forward, t

he future of the standard accent, is the speech of young upper class people moving in exclusive circles –Back again who may sound to other RP speakers as posh and pretentious as RP speakers sound to everyone else. –The new slang, you do it so awfully well In case there's any doubt that this is what he means, Gimson helpfully points out, as he goes through his 1962 description of the RP vowels, how these advanced young things would pronounce each one. For example, an advanced RP form of /e/ is di

pthongized in the direction of schwa, for example men, said, get [meən, seəd geət]. Advanced speakers may have an especially far back PALM vowel. As in a fast car from Mama and Papa. Advanced RP speakers may have little or no glide in the FACE, PRICE, GOAT, and MOUTH diphthongs. The word ‘loud’ may sound almost exactly like ‘lard’. So, my neighbours loathe my loud sounds. Advanced RP speakers are more likely to have a relatively open final vowel in words like very jolly party. The same applies t

o the final vowel transcribed with schwa in words like a rather super adventure. As for the RP centring diphthongs, Gimson tells us that advanced young speakers may shift the prominence onto the second element, pronouncing these words as /hjɜː, djɜː/ or even /hjɑː, djɑː/. I'm not making this up. Eight years later, of course, the advanced RP which in 1962 had been Gimson's idea of smart, and trendy , and the shape of things to come, is now exactly the accent that young people most reject and ridi

cule. This phonetic reversal of fortune may not have had the seismic consequences of the Profumo affair, but you might have expected a bit more discussion of it than there was. Skipping ahead to 1982 and John Wells’s Accents of English, he concedes that “social changes in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s… robbed Gimson's advanced RP speakers of their position as the most admired and imitated group. Over the last quarter-century all the signs are that the covert prestige of working-class speech is

acting as a more potent source of innovation than the overt prestige of advanced RP.” This idea of the seductiveness of low class speech was mentioned by Gimson in his 2nd edition. It was an idea with some traction outside Phonetics. John gives us this lovely sneering quote from the posh journalist and novelist Jilly Cooper, writing in 1978: “All those female interviewers talking about bunk bulences and Ufrica. I suppose they all grew up in the Sixties… when… working class became beautiful…” I'l

l come back to those vowels in a minute, but first I want to deal with this beautiful working class thing. Yes, the Beatles were about as loved and admired as it's possible to be, and they had regional urban accents of a kind that previously were heard mostly from comedians, if at all. But that didn't mean TV and radio interviewers wanted to sound Scouse. Millions of people followed Coronation Street on TV, but they weren't all saying by eck and trying to pass themselves of as Mancunian. I think

it was easier for RP speaking writers to acknowledge low class competition than to face the truth. Advanced RP had no overt prestige. It had collapsed practically the moment Gimson coined the term, back in 1962. The more powerful force wasn't attraction but repulsion. Looking back at British satirical comedy of the 1960s, it’s remarkable just how much of it involves mocking people who speak RP, especially advanced RP. Here’s the very opening of the Beyond the Fringe review which launched the sa

tire boom in 1960. Very good Buffy, you’ve almost got it. –When are you off to America? –I’m going in the next couple of days actually, so I thought I’d better brush up my Star Spangled Banner. –Well you have to. You have to be able to play that, otherwise they won’t give you a visa. –Mind you, you can see their point of view. If they didn’t have these regulations any old riff-raff could get in. –Yes, they’ve got a lot of riff-raff there already, haven’t they? –That’s the first thing that’ll str

ike you. –The riff-raff, you mean? And on and on it went, reaching a surreal climax with this 1970 assault from Monty Python on advanced types with their sports cars and preposterous vowels. The Upper Class Twit of the Year Show Vivian Smith-Smyth-Smith And there’s a jolly good crowd here today Oh, and they’re off! And it’s three layers of matchboxes to clear. And Simon’s over! And now it’s kicking the beggar Here he has to wake up the neighbour now. There, he’s woken him up! Traditionally there

had been a fairly linear relationship between being posh & privileged, and enjoying prestige. Of course privilege never stopped conferring advantage, but it became increasingly perceived, especially during the 1960s, as unfair. And the accent of those who had been in charge for so long became associated with all the laws, institutions and attitudes that were being swept away. And so, for the first time in history, it became possible to sound too posh for your own good. Take that quote from Jill

y Cooper, complaining about female interviewers and their bunk balances and Ufrica. What she was observing was that young media types, practically overnight, had started pronouncing words like TRAP with something that she thought sounded her STRUT vowel. She would have said something like bænk bælance and æfrica, and they'd started saying something like my more northern pronunciations, bank balance and Africa. But were they trying to sound northern? Hardly. For the short front vowels, which RP h

ad kept compressed into a small part of the vowel space, the flipping of posh speech from prestige to stigma was like the removal of a corset. Those compressed vowels could relax into a more natural distribution. Even the Queen did this a bit. Note also that this had nothing to do with Cockney type pronunciation, which, like Australian English, kept the front vowels pretty compressed. The clear adoption of Londonish features is, I think, a more recent thing, and probably somewhat more noticeable

in males, for whom street cred tends to have more appeal. This includes the Mockney label attached to various celebrities in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relatively recent spreading of traditionally London features like T-glottaling and TH-fronting across classes and regions. The story I’ve told embodies a pretty staggering irony: at exactly the historical moment that elite, socially exclusive speech flipped from being prestigious and setting the phonetic agenda to being an object of derision,

perceived as patronising, entitled and out of touch, at exactly that moment Gimson published his carefully, detailed description of just that accent. Now although events around 1962 pretty much sealed the fate of the RP vowel system, they had no such effect on Gimson's symbols and people's belief, however misplaced, in their accuracy. Which makes this a staggering double irony, because the symbols themselves became ever more entrenched. How could this be? We saw the blurb on the second edition o

f 1970, that stuff about eight years of change and RP losing ground and its description needing to be rewritten. And we saw Gimson's new paragraph about young folk rejecting authority and his nightmare vision of RP’s purity being diluted. Well, on closer inspection, those few sentences were pretty much the entirety of Gimson's revisions. They were just window dressing, lip service to the cultural upheaval that had just taken place. The claim that the sections on RP had been rewritten was mislead

ing to say the least. The vowel charts and the descriptions were all exactly as before. Including all the stuff about advanced RP. And it was essentially all there in the third edition of 1980, and the 4th edition of 1988, revised and published several years after Gimson had passed away. So users of English the world over were buying this book well into the 1990s, and being told exactly as in 1962 that the monophthongal GOAT vowel of advanced RP, as in I don’t know if I should go home, was right

on the verge of becoming the mainstream standard pronunciation. And of course the 1962 symbols had by now been fossilized. How that happened would take another video. And what of the term RP itself? Well, just as very many people the world over assume that Gimson's 1962 symbols are simply the right way to transcribe modern British English, so very many people the world over assume that Received Pronunciation is simply the right way to refer to modern British English. What's in a name as Shakesp

eare said. As long as we know what we're talking about, we could call the accent Kevin. The problem with RP is that we used to know exactly what we were talking about, both who spoke it and what it sounded like, but since the 1960s and all the social and phonetic changes, there's been massive confusion and little agreement. I think outside Britain, many people are unaware of the extent to which inside Britain the term is no longer used, or used in a specialized way. It's now 25 years since the I

PA handbook replaced it: “Standard Southern British is the modern equivalent of what has been called ‘Received Pronunciation’ (‘RP’). And I don’t consider this replacement to be a matter of political correctness: RP definitely existed. It's just that, as classically defined, namely as the speech of men who went to the poshest schools, it was a historical phenomenon that isn't there anymore. And outside academia, when journalists and cultural commentators use the term, there's a clear tendency to

use it for something that's markedly posh. Here it is, equated with pronouncing “and” as “end”. Here, it’s equated with sounding like a Hooray Henry. And here, it's mentioned as a way of referring to the speech of Jack Whitehall and his father, a pair whose most instantly recognisable feature is their poshnesh. And when acting legend Albert Finney died a few years ago (he came to fame in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but some of you might know him as the old gamekeeper in Skyfall) I think

the BBC obituary by cultural commentator Stephen Smith just about hit the nail on the head. I’d see the family right, but nobody else. Voiceover: This was the moment of the Angry Young Men, Kitchen Sink Drama. The beginning of the end for Received Pronunciation. And to explore your own history, don’t forget the 14-day free trial offer from MyHeritage. The link’s in the description below.