The vowels of RP CURE

A frequent realization of this phoneme is , the centring diphthong starting at FOOT and gliding to a mid to open central position. This sound is to be heard from trad-RP speakers, and from many speakers of RP of the middle and older generations especially.

Increasingly occurring as a feature of RP, however, is long monophthongal  , explained by Cruttenden (1994: 134) as a stage further than the  made possible for CURE by the loss of that sound as a feature of FORCE, where it was formerly heard: hence Shaw, sure, shore, formerly likely to be rendered in RP as  fall together for many present-day RP speakers as .