Rise And Fall Of R.P From The 16th To The 21th Centuries

Introduction

A statistic often been cited as RP speakers in Britain make up only 3% of the population. Certainly, at least in the 1970's, it seemed as if there were many more speakers RP around it. But a little reflection shows that this impression is due to the fact that it was much easier to listen to speakers from the RP accent in the media than their proportion in the population show. If people dispute the figure of 3%, it was only necessary to ask how many RP speakers who had been face to face contact with recently. As most readers of the sociolinguistic literature were not members of the Royal Family, the point was, ultimately, well taken. (Trudgill p.3)

Perhaps, therefore, so will be to discuss in this statistic comes from. The culprit was me. The popularized the figure of 3% in Trudgill (1974). (Incidentally, it is also suggested that only 12% of the population were the speakers of Standard English, which means that 9% of the population normally speaks Standard English with a regional accent, as mentioned in Chapter 15.) it did not, however, take this figure out of nowhere. It was, however, rather carefully considered, and it was as follows. My sociolinguistic study's urban dialect of Norwich, some of whose results were presented in Trudgill (1974), was based largely on interviews with a random sample of 50 persons drawn from the population of the city. This was a real random sample in which the entire voting age population in that time people over 21 had the same probability of selection. (Mugglestone p.10)

As usual in these samples, a small number of people refused to help, and one person had died. These were replaced in the usual way for others also randomly selected. He also rejected the people in my sample had not been educated in Norwich and surrounding areas - there was no point in the investigation of the phonology of English Norwich talking to the Lancastrians. The number of people rejected in this way was also very small - which would undoubtedly have been much higher today. From this sample of 50 people, only one was an RP speaker. (None of Towners rejected was an RP-speaker either.) In other words, the evidence of my random sample was that the people of Norwich contained only 2% of RP speakers. (Görlach P.12)

Historical background

To examine to what extent can generalize from this finding to Britain as a whole, had to take into account several factors: sampling error could have meant that the true proportion of RP speakers in Norwich may have actually been as high as, say, 5%, and had to consider the likelihood that speakers were more RP in some places, such as Cheltenham or bathroom, for example, than there were in Norwich, as also had to bear in mind that there were still other places, like Barcelona or town where the ratio could have been lower. In the end, ...