Standardisation

As with English around the world, the English language as used in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no equivalent body to the Académie française or the Real Academia Española, and the authoritative dictionaries (for example, Oxford English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Chambers Dictionary, Collins Dictionary) record usage rather than prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and neologisms are frequent.

For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the 9th century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education within Britain. Largely, modern British spelling was standardised in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), although previous writers had also played a significant role in this and much has changed since 1755. Scotland, which underwent parliamentary union with England only in 1707, still has a few independent aspects of standardisation, especially within its autonomous legal system.

The form of English taught across Europe is mainly that used in England and the subject is simply called "English".

Received Pronunciation and BBC English

What is Received Pronunciation?

"Although the BBC does not, and never did, impose pronunciations of its own on English words, the myth of BBC English dies hard. It owed its birth no doubt to the era before the Second World War, when all announcers ... spoke ... Received Pronunciation."²

Received Pronunciation, often abbreviated to RP, is an accent of spoken English. Unlike other UK accents, it's identified not so much with a particular region as with a particular social group, although it has connections with the accent of Southern England. RP is associated with educated speakers and formal speech. It has connotations of prestige and authority, but also of privilege and arrogance. Some people even think that the name 'Received Pronunciation' is a problem - if only some accents or pronunciations are 'received', then the implication is that others should be rejected or refused.

When writing his pronouncing dictionary in 1916, phonetician Daniel Jones described RP as the accent "most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding schools". Although this description would raise a few eyebrows today, RP is still the accent generally represented in dictionaries which give pronunciations, and it's also used as a model for the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Perhaps for this reason, RP is often thought of as an unchanging accent; a standard against which other accents can be measured or judged. Some people don't even think of it as an accent at all, but rather a way of speaking without an accent. Speaking without an accent, though, would be like painting without a colour! In fact, there is considerable variation within groups of people who are said to speak RP, the term is differently interpreted by different people, and RP itself has changed considerably over time.

What is BBC English? RP is closely associated with broadcasting in general, and the BBC in particular. It is widely believed - even if it isn't true - that the BBC traditionally employed as newsreaders and broadcasters only people who could speak RP. If you ask people to think of a person who might speak with a traditional RP accent, they'll often think of an old-fashioned BBC announcer, addressing the nation on the Home Service.

If the phrase 'BBC English' were taken literally, it would just mean English as spoken on the BBC - which today would mean virtually every kind of English from all around the world. But this is not what it means at all.

'BBC English' is a popular term for a particular acrolect - that is, a prestigious form of speech. Other, similar terms include 'Oxford English', 'the Queen's English', 'Standard English' and, of course, RP. Haran Rasalingam, posting on the Voices site, argues that "public school dialects, educated dialects and BBC dialects are dialects of status and power which is why people feel they should try to speak more like that rather than their own native dialect."

Is there such a thing as BBC English? The BBC doesn't require any of its broadcasters to speak with any particular accent. It could be argued that, even in those early years before the Second World War, the fact that the announcers and newsreaders heard on the BBC spoke RP was a by-product of the restricted social group from which BBC employees was drawn, rather than a matter of deliberate policy.

Nevertheless, the term 'BBC English' entered the language and is still widely used, even though - as we can see from the comments above - a range of accents are used on the BBC. The term is even being used by linguists. This maybe because, as we have seen, RP is a loaded and problematic term which conjures up many problems and prejudices. So some linguists now follow popular usage by relabelling what they used to call RP as 'BBC English' and, in some pronunciation dictionaries, the accent represented is now called 'BBC English' instead of RP.

There's a problem with this approach, though. If you call the accent normally used in BBC news broadcasts 'BBC English', and use that as an example of RP, then the people whom the BBC employs as news broadcasters are therefore RP speakers by definition. This circularity of defining 'BBC English' in relation to RP, and RP in relation to the BBC makes 'BBC English' meaningless as a concept. Ironically, this is happening just as the relationship between RP and so-called 'BBC English' might more logically be viewed as a thing of the past.