Spoken English presents wide variation in pronunciation. In spite of that wide variation, three standard pronunciations are distinguished: (1) The Received Pronunciation, also called Oxford English or BBC English, is the standard pronunciation of British English; (2) The General American is the accent considered as standard in North America, and as such it is the pronunciation heard in most of American films, TV series, and national news; (3) The General Australian is the English spoken in Australia. However, these three main accents should be interpreted as broad categories, for the English language has a great and rich diversity of varieties.
When people talk about learning British pronunciation, they usually think of Received Pronunciation (RP). RP is the pronunciation of the British upper class; it is sometimes called the Queen’s English. This is the pronunciation that you will learn at a British language school; it is also the model taught in coursebooks and dictionaries from publishers like Oxford and Longman.
“Normal” Britons usually speak with their local accents, which are often quite different from RP, and can be very hard to understand to untrained ears. Sometimes cities that are only 20 km apart have very different accents.
RP is non-rhotic, which means that the letter r is usually “silent”, unless it is followed by a vowel. Here’s how it works:
- In words like car, tower, inform and first, r is silent (r is not followed by a vowel).
- In words like red, foreign, print, r is pronounced (r is followed by a vowel).
- R is also pronounced at the end of a word, if the next word starts with a vowel, for example: number eight, far away.
- Most RP speakers also insert an r in phrases like: the idea(r) of, Africa(r) and Asia, law(r) and order. This r is not in the spelling; they just use it to separate two vowels.
The following pairs sound exactly the same in RP: or/awe, court/caught,sore/saw, farther/father, formerly/formally. In General American, they all sound different.
You should remember that whether you choose General American or RP, you will be understood by all English speakers, because everyone familiar with both of these accents from TV and movies.
