Unifying influences on dialects.
Communication lines such as roads if they are at least several centuries old, river valleys, or seacoasts often have a unifying influence. Also important urban centres often form the hub of a circular region in which the same dialect is spoken. In such areas the prestige dialect of the city has obviously expanded. As a general rule, those dialects, or at least certain dialectal features, with greater social prestige tend to replace those that are valued lower on the social scale.
In times of less frequent contact between populations, dialectal differences increase, in periods, of greater contact, they diminish. Mass literacy, schools, increased mobility of populations, and mass communications all contribute to this tendency. Mass migrations may also contribute to the formation of a more or less uniform dialect over broad geographic areas. Either the resulting dialect is that of the original homeland of a particular migrating population or it is a dialect mixture formed by the levelling of differences among migrants from more than one homeland.
The degree of dialectal differentiation depends to a great extent on the length of time a certain population has remained in a certain place. 5. Focal, relic, and transitional areas. Dialectologists often distinguish between focal areas - which provide sources of numerous important innovations and usually coincide with centres of lively economic or cultural activity - and relic areas - places toward which such innovations are spreading but have not usually arrived.
Relic areas also have their own innovations, which, however, usually extend over a smaller geographical area. Relic areas or relic phenomena are particularly common in out-of-the-way regional pockets or along the periphery of a particular languages geographical territory. The borders of regional dialects often contain transitional areas that share some features with one neighbour and some with the other.
Such mixtures result from unequal diffusion of innovations from both sides. Similar unequal diffusion in mixed dialects in any region also may be a consequence of population mixture created by migrations . 9, p.420 6. Received Pronunciation. The abbreviation RP Received Pronunciation denotes the speech of educated people living in London and the southeast of England and of other people elsewhere who speak in this way. If the qualifier educated be assumed, RP is then a regional geographical dialect, as contrasted with London Cockney, which is a class social dialect.
RP is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English it is itself only one particular regional dialect that has, through the accidents of history, achieved more extensive use than others. Although acquiring its unique status without the aid of any established authority, it may have been fostered by the public schools Winchester, Eton, Harrow and so on and the ancient universities Oxford and Cambridge. Other varieties of English are well preserved in spite of the levelling influences of film, television, and radio . 8, p.365 The ancestral form of RP was well-established over 400 years ago as the accent of the court and the upper classes.
The English courtier George Puttenham writing in 1589 thought that the English of nothern men, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen is not so courtly or so current as our Southern English is. The present-day situation.
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 most widely heard on the BBC but there are also conservative and trend-setting forms. Early BBC recordings show how much RP has altered over just a few decades, and they make the point that no accent is immune to change, not even the best. But the most important fact is that RP is no longer as widely used today as it was 50 years ago. Most educated people have developed an accent which is a mixture of RP and various regional characteristics - modified RP , some call it. In some cases, a former RP speaker has been influenced by regional norms in other cases a former regional speaker has moved in the direction of RP. 7. Who first called it RP? The British phonetician Daniel 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 1980 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 . 1960, 9th edn, p.12 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 all 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 . 1927, 3rd edn, p.149 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 . p.23 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 . 8, p.365 8.