Here are samples of the first twelve people listed on Wikipedia's
List of BBC newsreaders and reporters:
George Alagiah
Fiona Bruce
Rachel Burden
Victoria Derbyshire
Reeta Chakrabarti
T
ina Daheely
Victoria Derbyshire
Huw Edwards
Christian Fraser
Joanna Gosling
Jane Hill
Mishal Husain
They seem to be fairly typical of
professional speakers employed by the BBC as newsreaders and announcers on BBC1 and BBC2 television, the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4, as well as many commercial broadcasting organisations such as ITN.
I don't know many of those people. I know Fiona Bruce and George Alagiah, who are both good examples of RP. I know Huw Edwards too—he has a Welsh accent.
What do you think the benefits of the term BBC English over RP might be? What reasons did the English Pronouncing Dictionary give?
You have brought up this class point in at least one other thread.
Well, I brought up the subject, yes, but it was an unrelated point. Do you agree with me to any extent that there may be a correlation of some sort between likelihood to speak RP and middle-class background?
Whatever the reason (and I don't necessarily agree that it is class or other social factors), if there is a greater concentration of RP speakers in the South-East, then I can't see any valid objection to my saying that it is heard among many speakers in that region.
No, of course I don't object to that! I think you may have misunderstood my point. I think it is likely that the South-East is home to more RP speakers than any other region in the UK.
(When you say 'necessarily' do you mean that you don't completely disagree?)
You are the only person who has mentioned 'regional effect'.
Yes. I'm just trying to address what I think could be confusing to some people—the nature of the association between RP and the South-East of the UK. My claim is that the standard way of speaking that we call contemporary RP is not (fundamentally, at least) regional-bound, and so is not best described in those terms. It's more like a kind of standard, or norm, which, for whatever social/historical reasons we don't have to get into here, has become something of a prestige form.
I don't mean to suggest that there is no connection between RP and the South-East. The connection is that a lot of people in the South-East speak it. What I'm having trouble with, as someone who has lived all his life in London and the South-East, is the idea that RP is in some way
the way that people in the region speak. The fact is that RP is a), only one variety in a region of many, quite different varieties; b), not the dominant form in the region; and c), by no means exclusive to the region.