Royal Pain, of course. No, actually I believe it's Received Pronunciation. I recall learning about that in a linguistics course in college. I'll let other more informed types give more details.

By the way, nobody noticed my gaffe earlier, when I called the Hebrew or German or Scottish ch a "glottal fricative." In fact, the sound is made by putting the back of the tongue against the palate, and doesn't come from the glottis at all. Arabic, though, has a couple of glottal consonants. I think that the Hebrew letter kuf, which was transliterated in older texts as "Q", once was used to indicate a glottal stop, as in Arabic, but modern Hebrew does not use this sound and kuf is now pronounced "k". That might be what Brucie was referring to up above.   I also think that the Hebrew letter ayin, now considered to be a silent letter equivalent to the aleph, once had a similar, but softer, sound, again as in modern Arabic.

But I may be wrong on all that as well.

Aloha,
Mark