The vowels of contemporary RP: vowel formant measurements for BBC newsreaders

Abstract

The study aims to enrich the available acoustic data pertaining to vowels of what may tentatively be called contemporary RP or near-RP. The corpus comprised BBC radio and TV broadcasts of seven male and seven female newsreaders. F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthongs (kit, dress, trap, foot, strut, lot, fleece, palm, goose, thoughtandnurse) and 4 diphthongs (goat, price, mouthandface) were taken. The results are presented both as raw mean F1 and F2 frequencies in Hertz and on a plot normalised according to Lobanov (1971). The results, among other things, confirm our hypothesis that the onset ofmouthis now decidedly fronter than and does not overlap with the onset ofprice.Furthermore, we sought to determine the exact extent ofgoose-fronting, which according to our data is, even in this variety of English, fronter than centre, as well as the quality of thegoatglide, which seems to be following suit.

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