The Cockneyfication of R . P . ?

1. Introduction. A century ago Daniel Jones, the great describer and codifier of the Received Pronunciation of English (RP), was ten years old. He was born in 1881, so by 1891 we may assume that his own pronunciation (on which he doubtless based his description) was fixed in its essentials. Insofar as teachers of English Phonetics or English as a Foreign Language base their teaching on Jones's classic works (1917, 1918), they are operating with a model that is now a hundred years out of date. In practice, of course, those who are in contact with current English as now spoken have modified Jones's model, consciously or unconsciously, in this or that detail. A number of recent articles have attempted to list the phonetic changes that have taken place in RP since Jones's day (Ramsaran, 1990b; Wells, 1990b). Recognition that changes have occurred is attested by the often-heard assertion that`no-one speaks RP any more'. While this is true in the sense that no-one speaks Jonesian RP, it is only to be expected in view of the facts (i) that Jones's generation are by now all dead and (ii) that languages change. It is more helpful, and in my view more accurate, to say that RP is still alive as ever, but that it has undergone various changes.