Sharp Edda - How to Do Standard English Accents From Traditional RP to the New 21st-Century Neutral Accent

HOW TO DO
STANDARD ENGLISH
ACCENTS

HOW TO DO

Standard English

ACCENTS

Edda Sharpe &
Jan Haydn Rowles

OBERON BOOKS
LONDON

WWW.OBERONBOOKS.COM

First published in 2012 by Oberon Books Ltd
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Copyright Jan Haydn Rowles and Edda Sharpe 2012

Edda Sharpe and Jan Haydn Rowles are hereby identified as the authors of this work in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The authors have asserted their moral rights.

This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of it shall by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publishers consent in any form of binding or cover or circulated electronically other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on any subsequent purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84002-990-1

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

WHATS IN THIS BOOK

And Finally

WITH THANKS TO

Jeannette Nelson, Head of Voice, National Theatre, Lyn Darnley, Head of Voice, Royal Shakespeare Company, and all our fellow Accent Coaches who have supported us over the years. Our editors Andrew Walby and James Illman. James Hogan for his continued support in the How To Do Accents Series and all those at Oberon Books.

Jack Adams, Ben Allen, Arsher Ali, Nicola Collett, Deborah Cordery, Lucy Frederick, John Gillet, Edward Hicks, Wilbur Heynes and the Heynes family, Julie Legrand, Ashley McGuire, Octavia MacKenzie, Laura Rogers, Richard Ryder, Bethany Sharpe, Sarah Simmonds, Genievie Steele, Michelle Terry, Rachel Williams, David Willis, Rufus Gerrard Wright.

Special thanks to Steve Cooper (recording editor) and Terry OBrien (vocal artist) both of whom gave their indisputable talents and unyielding generosity to this project.

INTRODUCTION

RP, The Queens English, Sloane, Estuary, Oxford English, BBC English, Heightened, Advanced Marked RP, or just plain Posh? What exactly is a Standard English Accent?

In every drama school, in every English-speaking country, students from all over the world have to learn some form of Standard English Accent, and, whats more, voice and drama tutors have to teach it. But what exactly is it? How many varieties are there? And which one should they use when?

You will notice that we have called this book, How To Do Standard English Accents, and there is the clue.

In this book we aim to clarify the differences between a Standard English Accent which is considered neutral in terms of race, age, gender, occupation or social background, and Period, or Class-based accents, with their many varieties and styles. After all Hugh Grant may well sound posh but it just wouldnt be right for Hamlet. Or if it were, it would be a contemporary Hamlet that went to an English Public School. And theres the rub.

A variety of Standard English Accent which came to prominence in the 1920s was called Received Pronunciation, or RP for short, the word received being an old-fashioned word meaning accepted. Accents are usually named after the area they come from, but RP didnt come from a place, so much as from a type of person. The original narrow definition of RP included only persons who had been educated at one of what in Britain are called public schools (actually very expensive private schools) such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby, and was based on the upper and upper-middle-class speech patterns of Middle and South Eastern English.

It was this narrow accent that was adopted by educators and used as a standard to be taught and learned for public speaking, and thus for stage and broadcasting purposes. This was, to a certain extent, an accident of history. Had history taken a couple of different turns, a Hampshire or Yorkshire accent might have been the accent chosen as a standard.

But the perception of what is considered standard has, of course, changed over the course of time. The voices we associate with early BBC broadcasts, for instance, now sound extremely old-fashioned to most of us, and old RP has strong resonances of authority, social status and economic power. Varieties of this old accent are now confined to a very small section of society, the older upper and upper middle classes, older actors and broadcasters.

The acting industry still demands a Neutral Standard English Accent which can unify everyone without placing them in terms of age, class or region and the accent we would consider standard today is the one we hear being used by actors such as David Tennant, Janet McTeer or Kenneth Branagh.

In of this book we describe this NEW STANDARD ENGLISH ACCENT (NSEA).

Hear it:Track 1 Arthur the Rat and Track 2 Free Speech.

Although clearly a southern English accent, it lacks strong local accent features, and is a useful tool that has the convention of being non gender, race, age, class or region specific. It is English, as opposed to Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish, all of which have their own neutral standard accents. We finish with a nod to the Old Stage Standard which really illustrates how different the sound used to be!

In of the book we describe some upper-class varieties of Standard English Accent. The first is Traditional RP, a catch-all accent that is quite distinct from a New Standard English Accent. We then venture into the accents of the Imperial Lords and Ladies, the Military, Matrons and Landed Gentry, the Debs, Dandies and Bright Young Things, the Wartime Wendies and BBC Berties, the Sloane Rangers, and finally we give a nod to the New Wave.

Get into the scene

Accents dont exist in a vacuum: they are made by living, breathing communities, subject to the vagaries of history, politics, peer pressure, climate, culture, economics and more. Putting any accent into its historical, geographical and cultural context is an important step towards owning it and making it real.

Historically the concept of a Standard English accent could be said to have begun when the term Received Pronunciation was coined in 1869 by the linguist, A.J. Ellis.

Before 1870 many of the most eminent Victorians retained their regional accents throughout their lives. William Wordsworth had a Cumberland accent, Sir Robert Peels was Midlands, and, in spite of being educated at Eton and Oxford, William Gladstone had a strong Lancashire accent. Then came the Education Act of 1870, pioneered through Parliament by W.E. Forster.

The Education Act of 1870 not only established the English public school as the melting pot of upper and middle-class speech and society, but also started a boom in English prep schools. Now the children of country squires,city nobility, army officers, imperial civil servants, small-town lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and suburban dentists could be brought together from the ages of 8 to 18, drawn from many parts of the country, and educated in one confined space, with one standard accent, often isolated market towns like Uppingham, Sherborne, Tonbridge and Worksop.

McCrum et al, The Story of English, 1992.

This one standard accent soon came to be associated with The Establishment, and something to aspire to and emulate, particularly within the middle classes in London.