#jonathan culpeper

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The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness by Jonathan Culpeper [ get book ]

http://hububooks.blogspot.ro/2017/06/the-palgrave-handbook-of-linguistic.html

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For centuries, people have made aesthetic and social judgements about accents. From the sixteenth century onwards, a growing number of writers designated the speech of the upper ranks and, in particular, of the court in London as a prestige form. For example, George Puttenham (1589) advises the poet to use ‘the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires about London within lx. myles, and not much aboue’. With royalty sited at London and a 60-mile radius including the important cultural centres Cambridge, Oxford and Canterbury, it is not a surprise that the prestige form was based here. In the nineteenth century, this form was firmly established as the accent of the ruling classes through the public-school system. Those who could afford to send their children to public schools did so in the expectation that they would experience the accent so strongly associated with the upper classes, in other words, Received Pronunciation. Scholars have argued that one effect of this was to break down the regional associations of RP: an RP speaker from the south would sound similar to an RP speaker from the north, because they had been through the same education system. Today, although the majority of RP speakers live in the south-east of England, it is the case that the non-localised nature of RP is one of its characteristics: if you hear an RP speaker, you may guess their social background, but not where they come from. This non-localised characteristic is one that RP shares with standard written English: both stand in contrast with regional accents/dialects. They are both social constructions.

Jonathan Culpeper, History of English (italics mine)