Daily Dose of English 80
The British Accent (RP)
Daily Dose of English 80
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm really glad you can make it today, because in this episode, we're going to be talking about received pronunciation, British English, or standard Southern British English, however you want to talk about it, whatever you want to call it. There's lots of different names for it. But like I said yesterday, in yesterday's episode, I want to start doing a little mini series on different accents of English. because accents are something that I find really interesting and I just want to talk about them, really. And why not do it here to maybe help you learn a little thing or two about English pronunciation and sounds. And so let's get into it. First, I want to say I am not a linguist. I have not studied extensively accents. There's something that I'm interested in that I've heard a lot of and picked things up on and learned about. I have worked a lot with the American accent, with my accent that I have specifically. So I will be talking about other accents that I don't know a ton about. But I do use resources and try to bring the most up-to-date information that I can. However, I will almost certainly say some things wrong and make some small mistakes that shouldn't affect the usefulness of these episodes. And so I hope that you enjoy. But if you actually want to learn these accents, go listen to native speakers of these accents because that's gonna be a lot more useful for your long-term use of an accent. So let's start by talking about RP. RP or RP is what's often known as Received Pronunciation or Standard British English, specifically Standard Southern British English, because sort of in the north of the British Isles, there are very different accents that are also standard there. So Standard Southern British English, which is the, I guess, fancier accent that you might hear in London. Somebody who is trying to appear to sound like they don't have an accent really is going to use some sort of pronunciation like this. This is one of those accents that nobody really speaks exactly. Some people might have accents that are very close and they might use it professionally, but most people that use of a standard Southern British English-esque accent are going to have a few things here and there that they don't do. And so that's a big, I guess, asterisk with this accent. So let's start, just jump into it. So a lot of the consonants are the same as American English. Consonants, by the way, are the sounds that we use our mouth to like stop sound with in some way. Um, and so you can think of them as having a part of your mouth that stops the sound, um, and then releases it or, or changes it in some way. Vowels are these more open sounds, right? They're not consonants. So I, E, A, O, those are all open vowel sounds. But consonants have some kind of stoppage in them or changing, right? So p, b, v, th, z, sh, k. These are all different consonants. There's really not many changes between British, like really most of the American, sorry, most of the accents of English maybe have a couple of small consonant changes, but most of them are the same. So we're actually going to jump over that because I don't think it's that interesting. Because all of the interesting changes in different accents, okay, not all, most of the interesting changes come in vowels and the way that sentences sort of get put together. So, let's get into talking about the vowels of British English, and we're going to specifically start with the R vowels, because this is the most obvious part of British English, if you're coming from the US, from American English at least. Because in British English, you don't say your R's. Your R's at the ends of sounds get taken away. So words like red and bread still have a ruh sound, but an r at the end of a sound doesn't exist. It becomes an ah. So for example, the sounds in father, father, and start are going to be the same. Ah. Father and start. and the sounds in north false and thought are all the same north force and thought right you see there's a big difference there north for nor for thaw versus north false and thought there's a bit of a length difference but that's a different thing The other vowels can be quite similar, right? E as in fleece, OO as in goose, BEH as in bear, but there is, I think, a bit of a difference between EH and EH, which is EH like in dress and marry, and EH as in bear. I'm not exactly positive on that difference because I do say them a little bit differently in my accent, but yeah. I want to go through a lexical set with you. A lexical set is an example of basically a word that has each relevant sound, essentially. And so I'll just do one and I think you'll understand. So we'll start with the shorter vowels, right? So kit and dress, lot, trap, and foot. And then we have strut and comma. Those are the shorter vowel sounds at the beginning. And I'm doing my best version of received pronunciation here of standard Southern British English. And then we get into the R words. So we have near, square, thought, palm, a palm, and cure and nurse, cure, nurse. Those two are a bit different because I would say cure and nurse, but they have this slightly different higher sound there. We also have some longer diphthongs, some longer vowels, and fleece, face, choice, price, mouth, goose, and goat are the best pronunciations that I can do of those sounds. And so I hope that kind of generally gives you a bit of a sound overview of these sounds. Now, there's a lot of other things that happen. There's a lot more, I think, what are called glottal stops, or that's what they're called, but there's more of these. And in certain places, especially in sentences, in the US we tend to use them in different ways, but in Britain, for example, you might say bitten with a whole jump there, bitten, instead of bitten. or bitten, bitten, and there's a bit more of an openness to it, is how I describe it. I actually don't know the way to really say this in linguistic talk, but when I say bitten, it feels more closed in my accent. But when I think about it in bitten, it almost feels like it's a skip over something. Bitten versus bitten. I don't know if that makes any sense, maybe if you're hearing it, it does, but I find those sorts of little things interesting. What are some other interesting bits there that happen? Maybe I can talk about a sentence or anything like that, because there's so much that I could talk about, but I don't really know how it makes sense in a podcast form, because I don't speak this accent, so I can't really just do the whole podcast in it, and so I'm not really sure. I guess I'll talk about some splits, which are kind of cool. So a split is where some words that I might say the same are said differently by somebody. And so the famous one is the trap-bath split. The trap-bath. Or is it bath-trop? No, yeah, it's the trap-bath. Trap and bath are pronounced differently in most of the UK. There are plenty of places that don't, that say it like I do, trap and bath, with the same vowel, but the trap and bath split is interesting because there's a bunch of words that I don't know which one should be which, because these things aren't necessarily Regular right so gloss would be an ah gloss Not glass that that would be weird. However, I would just say normal glass And so there's these splits that happen from lots of words That make it sound have these different vowel sounds that are hard to learn. And this is one of the ways that somebody can figure out where somebody sort of is from. Because if you hear somebody pronouncing words differently than you would, but they say most things the same, you can pretty much guess that there's something going on. To give another example from the U.S., there is a merger, which is the opposite of a split, so a merger of two sounds in parts of the South of the U.S. of eh when it's before an N sound. So ten would be pronounced tin. Eight, nine, tin. And so some many people have a relatively general American accent where they sound kind of like I do, but they, instead of saying Ben, they might say bin. And instead of saying 10, they might say tin. And they don't really hear that. But to me, those sounds are very different. A similar thing happens for lots of these sounds in, in the UK, right? Or sorry, in Britain. And so in this case, the, the, uh, the, uh, the bath and the trap bat, the trap-bath split, rather, or the trap-bath split. And so that's another interesting thing of accents where you kind of have to learn which words fall into which category. You don't necessarily have to, right, but yeah. Anyways, there's more that I could talk about, but I also think I've rambled enough and I've talked enough about these things because, yeah. So I hope that this is somewhat helpful of you. What the hell am I saying? I hope that this has been kind of helpful for you. If you're interested in more about received pronunciation or you want to hear some, definitely go look up some British YouTubers or you can go to the Wikipedia article for received pronunciation. There's some pronunciation examples at the bottom. You can also listen to audiobooks from the UK. A lot of them are in some sort of received pronunciation. And it can be a really fun accent to learn because it's really not that hard and it's really helpful if you ever want to be a true like immerse in British content, but anyways, I'm gonna leave this episode there for today. I hope that you enjoyed Let me know down in the comments what you think about these sort of accent II episodes and maybe I'll do more Have a good one. Bye
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