Introduction
RP could be described as the Standard pronunciation of Standard British English. For example, it is the pronunciation used in British dictionaries and is the pronunciation taught to Foreigners in English books published by Oxford, Cambridge and other major British publishers. This does not mean that is any better or worse than other kind of English. Only a small number of people in Britain have an RP accent but as it is the English spoken by the Royal Family and many members of the nobility and the upper classes and was used almost exclusively by the BBC for many years, it has gained a certain prestige. That preeminence of RP has only begun to begun to be challenged seriously since the sixties. Like any other accent, RP has different varieties. Conservative, mainstream and advanced. Conservative RP and advanced are mainly spoken by elderly and young speakers of RP respectively. We must take into account that accents do not exist independently of the people who speak them so each person we might identify as an RP speaker will speak slightly differently from any other.