The vowels of RP BATH

The Received Pronunciation vowel is characteristically described as exclusively a long back spread vowel, its position being advanced from full retracted. This is undoubtedly a correct description for the vowel of very many speakers. Two matters must be taken into account for a proper description of RP, however. Firstly, the long vowel is becoming both increasingly centralized and more shortened, while the more retracted sound is perceived by most native speakers now to be worthy of Refined RP caricature as being unacceptably ‘plummy’. It would seem that the forward movement is being led by those words in the set where the vowel has a following nasal, as chance, sample.

This development might be connected with a second, the inclusion in the model adopted here of ‘Northern short a’ in the RP inventory. Many RP speakers, whose accent corresponds with that of other speakers on all other features, diverge particularly on this one variable, and might themselves use both [a:] and [a] variants interchangeably. (The other widespread Northern feature characterizing difference from the South,  in the STRUT vowel, is, unlike this BATH-vowel feature, usually attended by other markers of northernness, such as long monophthongal FACE or GOAT vowels.) The use of BATH-[a] will essentially be because the RP speaker has Northern or north Midland origins, in the regional accents of which areas there is no TRAP/BATH distinction; the use of [a:] will either be because the speaker has Southern or south Midland origins, and so comes from an area with vernacular TRAP/BATH distinction, or because their speech is conditioned by trad-RP.

Wells’s classification (1982: 297) of features as “Near-RP” on grounds of their not conforming to “phonemic oppositions found in RP” (of which [his] / æ ~ a:/ here is one) makes an assumption about RP structure supportable if one remains wedded to a south-centric view of the accent. Inclusion of BATH-vowel [a] in RP is on grounds already claimed: the accent is not to be thought of as an exclusively southern-British phenomenon (Upton, Kretzschmar and Konopka 2001: xii), and the inclusion of “a different set of criteria” resulting in “a somewhat diluted form of the traditional standard” (Gimson 1984: 53) is a description which well suits this move.