Intonation for Classic RP & Standard British

Jim Johnson covers four major intonation elements of classic Received Pronunciation (RP) or Standard British.

These are not appropriate for contemporary London speakers (likely Estuary is what you're looking for). This introduces intonation elements for the classic RP sound you might use for something like "The Importance of Being Earnest" or most Shaw plays.

Here's a transcript of the video:

I want to talk about intonation patterns in RP, Received Pronunciation, Standard British. So the biggest thing for American actors in working on, especially what I want to talk about is a classical RP sound, if you're working on like Importance of Being Earnest or something like that.

The intonation shifts, there's really four major ones I want to talk about.

One of them is basically just widen the pitch range that you cover. So in your own speech if you're covering a pitch range along this line, just spread those out further, so that your highs go higher and your lows go lower than what you might be used to. Especially the high ends going quite a bit higher. So you've got to be willing to take your pitch range and move it a little further up and a little bit further down. So that's what I would say is intonation element number one for Americans trying to speak with an RP Standard British accent, especially this classic RP.

Number two is what I like to call the flip where commonly there may be this sort of bounce way up and then way down, and oftentimes Americans, what we tend to do is we tend to tighten at the top, and then also just kind of crap out at the bottom. We just don't really accomplish it. What I'd like you to work on for RP, classic RP, is being able to go all the way up there, high and low, being able to support on either end, and keep your throat open. That's not necessarily an easy thing to do. And that's what I'll call the flip.

The other things that happen, three and four that I'm gonna describe, are actually really, really similar. Three is what I would call a steady rise, and four is what I'd call a steady fall. Where you just sort of take something, and you rise up steadily in pitch all the way through that phrase, so you might take something, and just move up this hill. You might take something and just move down that hill.

One of the challenges is it sort of takes away all the operative words, so what most actors do when they're working on this, they'll take this thing and go all the way up the hill, and they start to kind of go off of that ride. Or they'll take this all the way down the hill as well. So they start to bump off of it to do the operative words, which you certainly can do, but in their greatest extreme you'll be surprised at the degree to which you can go up a hill and end up getting somewhere where you wouldn't have expected to go at all.

That all sounds like a throw away. It's a little bit of a rattle through those words that you then just sort of toss off and don't have a big operative word that stands out.

So these are four elements of intonation in RP that a lot of American actors really need to work on to get that sort of classic style of Importance of Being Earnest.

There you go!

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