Received Pronunciation - Comparison With Other Varieties of English

Comparison With Other Varieties of English

• Like most other varieties of English outside Northern England, RP has undergone the foot–strut split: pairs like put/putt are pronounced differently.
• RP is a non-rhotic accent, so /r/ does not occur unless followed immediately by a vowel. Pairs such as father/farther, pawn/porn, caught/court and formally/formerly are homophones.
• RP has undergone the wine–whine merger so the sequence /hw/ is not present except among those who have acquired this distinction as the result of speech training. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, based in London, still teaches these two sounds as distinct phonemes. They are also distinct from one another in most of Scotland and Ireland, in the northeast of England, and in the southeastern United States.
• Unlike many other varieties of English language in England, there is no h-dropping in words like head or horse.
• Unlike most Southern Hemisphere English accents, RP has not undergone the weak-vowel merger, meaning that pairs such as Lenin/Lennon are distinct.
• Unlike most North American accents of English, RP has not undergone the Mary–marry–merry, nearer–mirror, or hurry–furry mergers: all these words are distinct from each other.
• Unlike many North American accents, RP has not undergone the father-bother or cot–caught mergers.
• RP does not have yod-dropping after /n/, /t/, /d/, /z/ and /θ/ and has only variable yod-dropping after /s/ and /l/. Hence, for example, new, tune, dune, resume and enthusiasm are pronounced /njuː/, /tjuːn/, /djuːn/, /rɪˈzjuːm/ and /ɪnˈθjuːziæzm/ rather than /nuː/, /tuːn/, /duːn/, /rɪˈzuːm/ and /ɪnˈθuːziæzm/. This contrasts with many East Anglian and East Midland varieties of English language in England and with many forms of American English, including General American. In words such as pursuit and evolution, both pronunciations (with and without /j/) are heard in RP. There are, however, several words where a yod has been lost with the passage of time: for example, the word suit originally had a yod in RP but this is now extremely rare.
• The flapped variant of /t/ and /d/ (as in much of the West Country, Ulster, most North American varieties including General American, Australian English, and the Cape Coloured dialect of South Africa) is not used very often. In traditional RP is an allophone of /r/ (used only intervocalically).