kindness, witness, toilet, fortunate. The phoneme (as in fair, care, there) was realized as a centring diphthong in the past, whereas many present-day speakers of RP pronounce it as a long monophthong . A change in the symbolisation of the GOAT diphthong reflects a change in the pronunciation of the starting point: older accounts of this diphthong describe it as starting with a tongue position not far from cardinal [o], moving towards [u]. This was often symbolized as /ou/ or /oʊ/. In modern RP the starting point is unrounded and central, and is symbolized /əʊ/. In a study of a group of speakers born between 1981 and 1993, it was observed that the vowel had shifted upwards, approaching in quality. The vowels and have undergone fronting and reduction in the amount of lip-rounding (phonetically, these can be transcribed and , respectively). As noted above, has become more open, near to cardinal . Consonants For speakers of Received Pronunciation in the late 19th century, it was common for the consonant combination (as in which, whistle, whether) to be realised as a voiceless labio-velar fricative (also transcribed ), as can still be heard in the 21st century in the speech of many speakers in Ireland, Scotland and parts of the US. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, the phoneme has ceased to be a feature of RP, except in an exaggeratedly precise style of speaking (the wine-whine merger). There has been considerable growth in glottalization in RP, most commonly in the form of glottal reinforcement. This has been noted by writers on RP since quite early in the 20th century. Ward notes pronunciations such as [njuːʔtrəl] for neutral and [reʔkləs] for reckless. Glottalization of /tʃ/ is widespread in present-day RP when at the end of a stressed syllable, as in butcher [bʊʔtʃə]. The realization of /r/ as a tap or flap [ɾ] has largely disappeared from RP, though it can be heard in films and broadcasts from the first half of the 20th century. The word very was frequently pronounced [veɾɪ]. The same sound, however, is sometimes pronounced as an allophone of /t/ when it occurs intervocalically after a stressed syllable - the "flapped /t/" that is familiar in American English. Phonetically, this sounds more like /d/, and the pronunciation is sometimes known as /t/-voicing. Word-specific changes A number of cases can be identified where changes in the pronunciation of