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Received Pronunciation 

Q:  What is "Received Pronunciation"? How did it come about? Where is one likely to hear "Received Pronunciation"?

Ans: A pronunciation of British English, originally based on the speech of the upper class of southeastern England and characteristic of the English spoken at the public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Until recently it was the standard form of English used in British broadcasting.   ( The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. )

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An overview of "Received Pronunciation"

More notes on Pronunciations of English ([David CRYSTAL: The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0 521 40179 8.]):

In England, one accent has traditionally stood out above all others in its ability to convey associations of respectable social standing and a good education. This "prestige" accent is known as RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION, or RP. It is associated with the south-east, where most RP-speakers live or work, but it can be found anywhere in the country. Accents usually tell us where a person is from; RP tells us only about a person's social or educational background.

In due course, RP came to sybolize a person's high position in society. During the 19th century, it became the accent of public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, and was soon the main sign that a speaker had received a good education. It spread rapidly throughout the Civil Service of the British Empire and the armed forces, and became the voice of authority and power. Because it was a regionally 'neutral' accent, and was thought to be more widely understood than any regional accent, it came to adopted by the BBC, when radio broadcasting began in the 1920s. During WW2, it became linked in many minds with the voice of freedom, and the notion of a "BBC pronunciation" grew.

Today, with the breakdown of rigid divisions between social classes and the development of the mass media, RP is no longer the preserve of a social elite. It is best described as an "educated" accent - though "accents" would be more precise, for there are several varieties. The most widely used is that generally heard on the BBC; but there are also conservative and trend-setting forms. The former is found in many older establishment speakers. The latter is usually associated with certain social and professional groups - in particular, the voice of the London upwardly mobile ("the Sloane Rangers") in the 1980s.

Early BBC recordings show how much RP has altered over just a few decades, and they point that no acccent is immune to change, not even 'the best'. But the most important observation is that RP is no longer as widely used today as it was 50 years ago. It is still the standard accent of the Royal Family, Parliament, the Church of England, the High Courts, and other national institutions; but less than 3 per cent of the British people speak it in a pure form now. Most educated people have developed an accent which is a mixture of RP and various regional characteristics -'modified RP', some call it.

Nonetheless RP continues to retain considerable status. It has long been the chief accent taught to foreigners who wish to learn a British model, and is thus widely used abroad (by far more peole, in fact, than have it as a mother-tounge accent in the UK).

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The etymology of "Received Pronunciation"

I think "received" here means widely accepted or understood, without necessarily being the most widely *used* pronunciation. David Crystal [1] has the following to say about it:

WHO FIRST CALLED IT RP?

The British phonetician Daniel S Jones was the first to codify the properties of RP. It was not a label he much liked, as he explains in an Outline of English Phonetics (1918):

“I do not consider it possible at the present time to regard any special type as'Standard'or as intrinsically 'better' than other types. Nevertheless, the type described in this book is certainly a useful one. It is based on my own (Southern) speech, and is, as far as I can ascertain, that generally used by those who have been educated at 'preparatory' boarding schools and the 'Public Schools'.... The term 'Received Pronunciation'... is often used to designate this type of pronunciation. This term is adopted here for want of a better.”

The historical linguist H. C. Wyld also made much use of the term 'received' in A Short History of English (1914):

“It is proposed to use the term Received Standard for that form which I would probably agree in considering the best, that form which has the widest currency and is heard with practically no variation among speakers of the better class all over the country. “

The previous usage to which Jones refers can be traced back to the dialectologist A. J. Ellis, in On Early English Pronunciation (1869):

“In the present day we may, however, recognize a received pronunciation all over the country ... It may be especially considered as the educated pronunciation of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit, and the bar.”

Even then, there were signs of the future, for he goes on to say:

“But in as much as all these localities and professions are recruited from the provinces, there will be a varied thread of provincial utterance running through the whole.”

RP has certainly changed in my lifetime, as anyone can verify by watching old wartime propaganda films and newsreels and listening to the way the officers spoke. That was the form known as "marked RP", which has virtually disappeared today, and has been modified even in the speech of the Queen and other members of the old aristocracy.

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Commentary on the Speakers of “Received Pronunciation”

Probably the context in which RP is most widely used is the academic world. Teachers of English as a Foreign Language were mentioned above but the great majority of school teachers within Britain, whether they have regional accents or not, will tend to speak in an accent as close as possible to RP in order to communicate effectively. This is not to say that a regional accent should be a barrier to their ability to teach, but nonetheless RP is considered appropriate in the classroom, particularly in higher education.

University lecturers want to convey new information to a large number of students simultaneously, often involving complex ideas. In such a context, we can see the value of an exceptionally clear and universally understood standard pronunciation. Students need not imitate this accent in order to assimilate the information but the fact that it is expressed in RP may well help them to undersand more easily.

Perhaps surprisingly, one group of speakers who will tend to stay close to RP are those who have learnt English as a second language and achieved a high level of fluency. It is usually quite noticeable because so few native-speakers speak so clearly. People who have learnt English . They are unlikely to adopt linguistic habits that diverge from RP, because they learnt the RP 'standard' pronunciation. Of course, a non-native speaker of English can develop a regional accent, if, for instance, they came to an area with little or no knowledge of English and learnt the language entirely in that region.

Extract from http://www.yaelf.com/rp.shtml