English Language & Usage Asked on May 23, 2021
I’m trying to choose between RP and my current conventional accents/pronunciations.
For already two weeks I’ve been looking for some proves that RP is worth something and it’s well-accepted everywhere. But I failed. I’ve only got some proves that no one uses complete RP or even partially. People, especially native speakers, do not like it.
So now when I look up some new words I can’t choose which pronunciation to pick up. Like here:
a tourist: conventional – /ˈtʊərɪst/, RP – /ˈtɔːrɪst/
Can you recommend which option to choose? Which pronunciation is more relevant or better for ESL students?
For your specific example, the phoneme /ʊə/ is being lost from RP. Now, it's mainly older, conservative speakers who use the pronunciation [ʊə]. In one-syllable words, younger RP speakers generally merge it /ɔː/, so poor, tour, moor, sure are homonyms with pour, tore, more, shore. See this webpage, which also details several other changes that are happening to the English language.
For ESL students, this means that you can totally dispense with learning the phoneme /ʊə/, which I would assume makes things easier. (Although in a few words like rural, it gets replaced by vowels other than /ɔː/, so if you want perfect pronunciation, you need to be a little careful.)
Changes don't happen only in English; in any language spoken by a large number of people, sounds are always changing. For example, the reason that Beijing used to be spelled Peking is that the middle consonant used to be [k] rather than [tɕ]. And these changes don't happen all at once, so during the transition period different people use different pronunciations.
Answered by Peter Shor on May 23, 2021
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