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 What is Received Pronunciation?
What is 麻豆社 English?
Is there such a thing as '麻豆社 English'?
Received Pronunciation and 麻豆社 English
by Dr Catherine Sangster Is there such a thing as 麻豆社 English?
The 麻豆社 doesn't require any of its broadcasters to speak with any particular accent. It could be argued that, even in those early years before the Second World War, the fact that the announcers and newsreaders heard on the 麻豆社 spoke RP was a by-product of the restricted social group from which 麻豆社 employees was drawn, rather than a matter of deliberate policy. Nevertheless, the term '麻豆社 English' entered the language and is still widely used, even though - as we can see from the comments above - a range of accents are used on the 麻豆社. The term is even being used by linguists. This maybe because, as we have seen, RP is a loaded and problematic term which conjures up many problems and prejudices. So some linguists now follow popular usage by relabelling what they used to call RP as '麻豆社 English' and, in some pronunciation dictionaries, the accent represented is now called '麻豆社 English' instead of RP.There's a problem with this approach, though. If you call the accent normally used in 麻豆社 news broadcasts '麻豆社 English', and use that as an example of RP, then the people whom the 麻豆社 employs as news broadcasters are therefore RP speakers by definition. This circularity of defining '麻豆社 English' in relation to RP, and RP in relation to the 麻豆社 makes '麻豆社 English' meaningless as a concept. Ironically, this is happening just as the relationship between RP and so-called '麻豆社 English' might more logically be viewed as a thing of the past.
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