Patterns Of Monophthongal Vowel Changes In Queen’s English:

Research findings have shown that the Queen’s English has shifted in the direction of a more mainstream Received Pronunciation and becomes no more royal at all. In this thesis, the Queen’s RP, the generally acknowledged as the standard accent in Britain, has been studied to find whether there are such changes in Queen’s English and what are the patterns of the Queen’s monophthongal vowel changes since1950s.A database of nine Christmas addresses delivered by Queen ElizabethⅡ, the1950’s, the1980’s and the2000’s, is employed to discover the pattern of the Queen’s monophthongal vowel changes in space from1950s to1980s,1980s to2000s, and1950s to2000s to see the extent to which an adult’s vowel space is affected by vowel changes of the community; to show the patterns of the Queen’s monophthongal vowel changes in tongue height and tongue retraction, and the shifting direction of these vowels of the Queen’s RP in the21st century by using Praat. It is found that the pattern of monophthongal vowel changes in space is found to have expanded vertically and separately since1950s. And the patterns of monophthongal vowel changes in tongue height and tongue retraction are manifested by every single vowel. Many of the RP vowel changes found in this study have supported the findings given by many other experts and these changes have taken place primarily in the period from the1950s to the1980s with slight changes from the1980s to the21st century. Compared with the vowel positions of1980’s Standard Southern British speakers reported in Deterding, these changes are in the direction of the more mainstream RP even though they are not attaining the mainstream RP.