RP as sociolinguistic object

Abstract

In the linguistic literature there are many descriptions of the phonological and phonetic characteristics of Received Pronunciation or RP. There is however one influential sociolinguistic paradigm, the field of descriptive or Labovian sociolinguistics, also known as Language Variation and Change (Chambers, Trudgill and Schilling-Estes 2001), or as Accent Studies (Foulkes and Docherty 1999: 4) where RP tends to be somewhat neglected. The discipline is largely concentrated on the study of non-standard varieties (see e.g. the collection in Foulkes and Docherty 1999), as must befit a modern dialectological discipline essentially concerned with linguistic diversity.