Where is RP going?: A Study of the British Royal Family's Speech

This dissertation aims at tracing the evolution that Received Pronunciation has experienced from its origins to nowadays. This evolution is followed from a historical, social and linguistic perspective, which reveals that RP may be diluting into other varieties of British English. In order to test this hypothesis, the Refined RP of the Royal Family has been taken as a symbol of steadiness that may have been affected by these changes. For this purpose, a corpus of video files has been selected with data from 1953 to nowadays, taking Queen Elizabeth II and the heirs to the throne, Prince Charles and Princes William and Harry, as representatives of the Royal Family’s speech. Following the evolution of several phonetic and phonological features through the samples, it is concluded that the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s accents are moderately adapting to the new times while Princes William and Harry’s RP is much more advanced and similar to the general, educated speech of their young contemporaries. These results would imply that RP is rapidly changing and probably, therefore, merging into more modern varieties such as Estuary English