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Received Pronunciation is defined as the educated spoken English of southeastern England

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The accent known to many people outside the United Kingdom as British English is Received Pronunciation, which is defined as the educated spoken English of southeastern England. Earlier it was held as better than other accents and referred to as the King's (or Queen's) English, or even "BBC English". Originally this was the form of English used by radio and television. However, for several decades other accents have been accepted and are frequently heard, although stereotypes about the BBC persist. English spoken with a mild Scottish accent has a reputation for being especially easy to understand.

Even in the south east there are significantly different accents. The local inner east London accent called Cockney is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation and can be difficult for outsiders to understand.

There is a new form of accent called Estuary English that has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it is has some features of Received Pronunciation and some of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still changing, partly influenced by Black speech. Londoners speak with a mixture of these accents, depending on class, age, upbringing, and so on.

Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language, usually defined as the "educated spoken English of southeastern England". According to Fowler (1965) the term is "the Received Pronunciation".

RP speech is non-rhotic, meaning that written r is pronounced only if it is followed by a vowel.

Earlier Received Pronunciation was sometimes referred to as "BBC English" (as it was traditionally used by the BBC) and as "the Queen's English". Both terms remain in use today, though less frequently than in past decades.

Received Pronunciation (or RP) is a special accent - a regionally neutral accent that is used as a standard for broadcasting and some other kinds of public speaking. It is not fixed - you can hear earlier forms of RP in historical broadcasts, such as newsreel films from the Second World War. Queen Elizabeth II has an accent close to the RP of her own childhood, but not very close to the RP of the 21st century.

RP excites powerful feelings of admiration and repulsion. Some see it as a standard or the correct form of spoken English, while others see its use (in broadcasting, say) as an affront to the dignity of their own region. Its merit lies in its being more widely understood by a national and international audience than any regional accent. Non-native speakers often want to learn RP, rather than a regional accent of English. RP exists but no-one is compelled to use it. But if we see it as a reference point, we can decide how far we want to use the sounds of our region where these differ from the RP standard. And its critics may make a mistake in supposing all English speakers even have a regional identity - many people are geographically mobile, and do not stay for long periods in any one place.

RP is also a very loose and flexible standard. It is not written in a book (though the BBC does give its broadcasters guides to pronunciation) and does not prescribe such things as whether to stress the first or second syllable in research. You will hear it on all the BBC's national radio channels, to a greater or less degree. On Radio 3 you will perhaps hear the most conservative RP, while Radio 5 will give you a more contemporary version with more regional and class variety - but these are very broad generalizations, and refer mainly to the presenters, newsreaders, continuity announcers and so on. RP is used as a standard in some popular language reference works. For example, the Oxford Guide to the English Language (Weiner, E [1984], Pronunciation, p. 45, Book Club Associates/OUP, London) has this useful description of RP:

“The aim of recommending one type of pronunciation rather than another, or of giving a word a recommended spoken form, naturally implies the existence of a standard. There are of course many varieties of English, even within the limits of the British Isles, but it is not the business of this section to describe them. The treatment here is based upon Received Pronunciation (RP), namely 'the pronunciation of that variety of British English widely considered to be least regional, being originally that used by educated speakers in southern England.' This is not to suggest that other varieties are inferior; rather, RP is here taken as a neutral national standard, just as it is in its use in broadcasting or in the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Many Britons abroad modify their accent to make their pronunciation closer to Received Pronunciation, in order to be better understood than if they were using their usual accent. They may also modify their vocabulary and grammar to be closer to Standard English, for the same reason.

Traditionally, Received Pronunciation is the accent of English which is "the everyday speech of families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding schools" (Daniel Jones, English Pronouncing Dictionary, 1926 - he had earlier called it Public School Pronunciation), and which conveys no information about that speaker's region. For many years, the use of Received Pronunciation has been considered a mark of education by some within Britain. As a result, elitist notions have sprung up around it, and those who use it have often considered those who do not to be less educated than themselves.

There is some truth in this, however, as historically most of the best educational institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, many public schools) were located in the south-east, so anybody who was educated there would pick up the accent of their peers.

However, from the 1970s onwards, attitudes towards Received Pronunciation have been slowly changing. Today, the accents of the English regions and of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are more likely to be considered to be on a par with Received Pronunciation. BBC reporters no longer need to, and often do not, use Received Pronunciation. Stereotypes outside the UK nevertheless persist.

The ongoing spread of Estuary English from the London metropolitan area through the whole South-East leads some people to believe that this will take the place of Received Pronunciation as the "Standard English" of the future. There are, however, important factors that militate against this, including the perceived inferior status and alleged lower intelligibility of Estuary English, which is characterized by the dropping of consonants and use of the glottal stop.

The closest equivalent in the United States is the General American pronunciation. In general, US network broadcasters use the Standard Midwestern accent.

In general, the accent gives great importance to vowel sounds, which are extended and rounded.

In the following, SAMPA pronunciation is given in square brackets ([]), and IPA in solidi (//).

In RP, as for most English speakers, but not for speakers of some other English dialect:

"Oh!" is pronounced as a diphthong [@U] /əʊ/, with a w sound to round off the word.

"Room" is often (but not always) pronounced with a short vowel sound [ru:m, rUm] /ru:m, rʊm/. In addition to manipulating the vowels, great attention is paid to articulating consonants clearly. Therefore, whilst some accents may "drop hs", transforming "hello" to "'ello", or merge the t sound and the d sound at the beginning of unaccented syllables, pronouncing "coding" and "coating" the same (as some Americans and Australians do), Received Pronunciation makes sure to enunciate every consonant distinctly, except for the r consonant, which is not pronounced when it immediately precedes a consonant (as in cart), and which is enunciated at the end of syllables only when linking with vowel sounds. This is true regardless of whether the syllable linking is intrinsic or extrinsic to a word. For example: The word "heresy" ["hEr@sI] /'hɛrəsɪ/ has a clear r consonant, but the word "hearsay" ["hI@sEI] /'hɪəsɛɪ/ does not. Similarly, "here we are" does not have either r pronounced, but "here it is" has its single r clearly pronounced. Further, it is considered acceptable in RP, but by no means obligatory, that in an expression such as "law and order" there should be an r linking "law" and "and", making the final product sound like [lO:r@ndO:d@(r)] /lɔ:rəndɔ:də(r)/ when spoken. The final r here obviously depends on what follows. There is a great number of distinct vowel sounds, for example "caught" [kO:t] /kɔ:t/, "cot" [kQt] /kɒt/, "cart" [kA:t] /kɑ:t/ are different in Received Pronunciation. On the other hand, in common with most non-rhotic dialects "formerly" and "formally" ["fO:m@lI] /'fɔ:məlɪ/ are homophones in Received Pronunciation, although rhotic speakers pronounce the words differently from each other. Similarly "ion" and "iron". The a sound is particularly elongated, sounding like "ah", noted in the pronunciation of words such as "class" [klA:s] /klɑ:s/. It also drops the h from wh, pronouncing "Wales" and "whales" identically [wEIlz] /wɛɪlz/. Standard English is a general term for a form of written and spoken English that is considered the model for educated people. There are no set rules or vocabulary for "standard English" because, unlike languages such as French, English does not have a governing body (see Académie française) to establish usage. As a result, the concept of "standard English" tends to be fluid. Without the notion of Standard English, we may find it hard to identify anything as a dialect at all - since the distinctiveness of a dialect consists in those things that are different from the Standard. (This does not mean that a dialect emerged from people who took Standard English and then changed it; it is more likely that the standard variety and the dialect variety developed from some common and some locally distinctive influences over time, or that the dialect forms are older, and have been more resistant to tendencies to converge towards a standard variety.)There is a problem in identifying any dialect as the standard, since this implies that other dialects are inferior or wrong. In the case of spoken English, we have good evidence that such prejudice exists - so there is an exaggerated danger that, in referring to a standard, we will strengthen what is already a tyranny. It may help to note that Standard English, too, is a dialect - albeit one that is no longer found in any one region of Britain. Barrie Rhodes notes:This is what has been termed "...the tyrrany of the standard" which gives the impression that there is something called "English" and all other varieties are, somehow, degraded, deficient, "incorrect" forms of this. [The idea of convergence towards this standard] for me, reinforces the impression that there is some set-in-stone ideal towards which people should strive. Some observers would claim that this is what made people uncomfortable and ashamed of their native speech modes...The notion is very strong and well established that there is something called "English"...And everything else is a deviation from this, arrived at through ignorance of the "proper" form. When I give talks to various groups, I find the biggest challenge is to get people to accept that there are many Englishes, all with an equal and valid claim to be "proper" within their own contexts. Only historical and geographical accidents brought prestige to what today we call the standard. But students could usefully ask (within a sociolinguistic paradigm) why people still choose to use non-standard speech when "...they should know better". My paternal grandmother...heard on the radio, understood and wrote Standard English (very well) - but she never spoke it. Had she done so, she would have soon found herself socially distanced from the close "West Riding" speaking community she lived in. There are all sorts of identity and self-esteem issues here that are worth investigating.The "standard" is a human choice that could have been otherwise (like driving on the right or left). It is not in any intrinsic way better or worse than other dialects. Nor are the historic regional dialects corrupt variants. Indeed, in many cases they preserve far older lexis, meanings or grammar than the so-called standard.The issue is particularly complicated because English has become the most widely used language in the world, and therefore it is the language most subject to alteration by non-native speakers. A rough rule of thumb used in some parts of the world, particularly those that belong or belonged to the British Commonwealth, is to follow pronunciation and usage guides of BBC broadcasting. Some residents oppose what they see as the linguistic mandate of moneyed classes and intentionally use non-standard English as a form of protest. Many areas of the world refer to American English for standard pronunciations.

English language in England refers to the English language as spoken in England.