Consonants Nasals and
liquids (, , , , ) may be
syllabic in
unstressed syllables. The consonant in RP is generally a
postalveolar approximant, which would normally be expressed with the sign in the
International Phonetic Alphabet, but the sign is nonetheless traditionally used for RP in most of the literature on the topic.
Voiceless plosives (, , , ) are
aspirated at the beginning of a syllable, unless a completely unstressed vowel follows. (For example, the is aspirated in "impasse", with primary stress on "-passe", but not "compass", where "-pass" has no stress.) Aspiration does not occur when precedes in the same syllable, as in "spot" or "stop". When a
sonorant , , , or follows, this aspiration is indicated by partial
devoicing of the sonorant. is a
fricative when devoiced. Syllable final , , , and may be either preceded by a
glottal stop (
glottal reinforcement) or, in the case of , fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before a
syllabic nasal (
bitten ). The glottal stop may be realised as
creaky voice; thus, an alternative phonetic transcription of
attempt could be . As in other varieties of English, voiced plosives (, , , ) are partly or even fully devoiced at utterance boundaries or adjacent to
voiceless consonants. The voicing distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds is reinforced by a number of other differences, with the result that the two of consonants can clearly be distinguished even in the presence of devoicing of voiced sounds: • Aspiration of voiceless consonants syllable-initially • Glottal reinforcement of /p, t, k, tʃ/ syllable-finally • Shortening of vowels before voiceless consonants As a result, some authors prefer to use the terms
fortis and lenis in place of
voiceless and
voiced. However, the latter are traditional and in more frequent usage. The voiced dental fricative () is more often a weak
dental plosive; the sequence in phrases like
even then is often realised as (a long
dental nasal). has
velarised allophone () in the
syllable rhyme. becomes voiced () between
voiced sounds.
Vowels Examples of
short vowels: in
kit,
mirror and
rabbit, in
foot and
cook, in
dress and
merry, in
strut and
curry, in
trap and
marry, in
lot and
orange, in
ago and
sofa. Examples of
long vowels: in
fleece, in
goose, in
bear, in
nurse and
furry, in
north,
force and
thought, in
father and
start. The long mid front vowel is elsewhere transcribed with the traditional symbols . The predominant realisation in contemporary RP is
monophthongal.
"Long" and "short" vowels Many conventional descriptions of the RP vowel system group the non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short". This should not be taken to mean that RP has
minimal pairs in which the only difference is vowel length. "Long" and "short" are convenient cover terms for a number of phonetic features. The long-short pairings shown above include also differences in vowel quality. The vowels called "long"
high vowels in RP and are slightly
diphthongized, and are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs and . The starting point of the diphthongal can be either close to or a more centralised and even unrounded , and its narrow transcriptions could be either or . Vowels may be phonologically long or short (i.e. belong to the long or the short group of vowel phonemes) but their length is influenced by their context: in particular, they are shortened if a voiceless (
fortis) consonant follows in the syllable, so that, for example, the vowel in
bat is shorter than the vowel in
bad . The process is known as
pre-fortis clipping. Thus phonologically short vowels in one context can be phonetically
longer than phonologically long vowels in another context. For example, the vowel called "long" in
reach (which ends with a voiceless consonant) may be shorter than the vowel called "short" in the word
ridge (which ends with a voiced consonant). Wiik, cited in , published durations of English vowels with a mean value of 172
ms for short vowels before voiced consonants but a mean value of 165 ms for long vowels preceding voiceless consonants. In
natural speech, the plosives and often have no audible release utterance-finally, and voiced consonants are partly or completely devoiced (as in ); thus the perceptual distinction between pairs of words such as
bad and
bat, or
seed and
seat rests mostly on vowel length (though the presence or absence of glottal reinforcement provides an additional cue). Unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralised than stressed ones. In unstressed syllables occurring before vowels and in final position, contrasts between long and short high vowels are neutralised and short and occur (e.g.
happy ,
throughout ). The neutralisation is common throughout many English dialects, though the phonetic realisation of e.g. rather than (a phenomenon called
happy-tensing) is not as universal. According to phonetician
Jane Setter, the typical pronunciation of the short variant of is a weakly rounded
near-close near-back rounded vowel .
Diphthongs and triphthongs The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP. The vowel (as in
door,
boar) had largely merged with by the Second World War, and the vowel (as in
poor,
tour) has more recently merged with as well among most speakers, although the sound is still found in conservative speakers, and in less common words such as
boor. See
– merger. More recently has become a pure long vowel , as explained above. is increasingly pronounced as a monophthong , although without merging with any existing vowels. The diphthong is pronounced by some RP speakers in a noticeably different way when it occurs before , if that consonant is
syllable-final and not followed by a vowel (the context in which is pronounced as a "dark l"). The realisation of in this case begins with a more back, rounded and sometimes more open vowel quality; it may be transcribed as or . It is likely that the backness of the diphthong onset is the result of
allophonic variation caused by the raising of the back of the tongue for the . If the speaker has "l-vocalization" the is realised as a back rounded vowel, which again is likely to cause backing and rounding in a preceding vowel as
coarticulation effects. This phenomenon has been discussed in several blogs by
John C. Wells. In the recording included in this article the phrase "fold his cloak" contains examples of the diphthong in the two different contexts. The onset of the pre- diphthong in "fold" is slightly more back and rounded than that in "cloak". RP also possesses the
triphthongs as in
tire, as in
tower, as in
lower, as in
layer and as in
loyal. There are different possible realisations of these items: in slow, careful speech they may be pronounced as two syllables with three distinct vowel qualities in succession, or as a monosyllabic triphthong. In more casual speech the middle vowel may be considerably reduced, by a process known as
smoothing, and in an extreme form of this process the triphthong may even be reduced to a single long vowel. In such a case the difference between , , and in
tower,
tire, and
tar may be
neutralised with all three units realised as or . This type of smoothing is known as the
tower–tire, tower–tar and tire–tar mergers.
BATH vowel There are differing opinions as to whether in the BATH
lexical set can be considered RP. The pronunciations with are invariably accepted as RP. The
English Pronouncing Dictionary does not admit in BATH words and the
Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists them with a § marker of non-RP status.
John Wells, who grew up in the
north of England and uses in "bath" and "glass", considers this the only acceptable phoneme in RP. Others have argued that is too categorical in the north of England to be excluded.
Clive Upton believes that in these words must be considered within RP and has called the opposing view "south-centric". Upton's
Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English gives both variants for BATH words. A. F. Gupta's survey of mostly middle-class students found that was used by almost everyone who was from clearly north of the
isogloss for BATH words. She wrote, "There is no justification for the claims by Wells and Mugglestone that this is a sociolinguistic variable in the north, though it is a sociolinguistic variable on the areas on the border [the isogloss between north and south]". In a study of speech in
West Yorkshire,
K. M. Petyt wrote that "the amount of usage is too low to correlate meaningfully with the usual factors", having found only two speakers (both having attended boarding schools in the south) who consistently used .
Jack Windsor Lewis has noted that the Oxford Dictionary's position has changed several times on whether to include short within its prescribed pronunciation. The
BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names uses only , but its author, Graham Pointon, has stated on his blog that he finds both variants to be acceptable in place names. Some research has concluded that many people in the
North of England have a dislike of the vowel in BATH words. A. F. Gupta wrote, "Many of the northerners were noticeably hostile to , describing it as 'comical', 'snobbish', 'pompous' or even 'for morons'." K. M. Petyt wrote that several respondents "positively said that they did not prefer the long-vowel form or that they really detested it or even that it was incorrect". Mark Newbrook has assigned this phenomenon the name "conscious rejection", and has cited the vowel as "the main instance of conscious rejection of RP" in his research in West
Wirral.
French words John Wells has argued that, as educated British speakers often attempt to pronounce French names in a French way, there is a case for including (as in ), and and (as in ), as marginal members of the RP vowel system. He also argues against including other French vowels on the grounds that not many British speakers succeed in distinguishing the vowels in and , or in and . However, the
Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary draws a distinction between (there rendered as ) and the unrounded of for a total of four nasal vowels.
Alternative notations Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription.
Clive Upton devised a modified system for the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) based on contemporary pronunciation. His changes to five symbols from the traditional Gimson system are now used in many other
Oxford University Press dictionaries; Lindsey's system is as follows—differences between it and standard transcription are depicted with the traditional transcription in parentheses. ==Historical variation==