English pronunciation is divided into two main
accent groups, the 'rhotic and non-rhotic', depending on when the sound typically represented in spelling with the letter R is pronounced. (The word ''rhotic'' is pronounced in
General American and in
RP.) Rhotic speakers pronounce written in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce only if it is followed by a
vowel sound (see "
linking and intrusive R"), and not always even then. In
linguistic terms, non-rhotic accents are said to exclude the
phoneme from the
syllable coda. This is commonly referred to as the post-vocalic R, although that term can be misleading because not all Rs that occur after vowels are excluded in non-rhotic English.
Development of non-rhotic accents
On this map of
England, the red areas are where the rural accents were rhotic as of the 1950s. Based on H. Orton et al., ''Survey of English dialects'' (1962–71). Note that some areas with partial rhoticity (for example parts of the East Riding of Yorkshire) are not shaded on this map.
Red areas are where English dialects of the late 20th century were rhotic. Based on P. Trudgill, ''The Dialects of England''.
The earliest traces of a loss of in English are found in the environment before in spellings from the mid-15th century: the
Oxford English Dictionary reports ''bace'' for earlier ''barse'' (today "
bass", the fish) in 1440 and ''passel'' for ''parcel'' in 1468. In the 1630s, the word ''
juggernaut'' is first attested, which represents the
Hindi word ''jagannāth'', meaning "lord of the universe". The English spelling uses the
digraph ''er'' to represent a Hindi sound close to the English
schwa. Loss of coda apparently became widespread in southern England during the
18th century;
John Walker uses the spelling ''ar'' to indicate the
broad A of ''aunt'' in his 1775 dictionary and reports that ''card'' is pronounced "caad" in 1791 (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 47).
Non-rhotic speakers pronounce the in ''red'', and most pronounce it in ''torrid'' and ''watery'' (in each case the is followed by a vowel) but not the written R of ''hard'', nor that of ''car'' or ''water''. However, in most non-rhotic accents, if a word ending in written "r" is followed closely by another word beginning with a vowel, the is pronounced—as in ''water ice''. This phenomenon is referred to as "
linking R". Many non-rhotic speakers also insert
epenthetic s between vowels when the first vowel is one that can occur before syllable-final ''r'' (''drawring'' for ''drawing''). This so-called "
intrusive R" is frowned upon by those who use the non-rhotic
Received Pronunciation but even they frequently "intrude" an
epenthetic at word boundaries, especially where one or both vowels is schwa; for example ''the idea of it'' becomes ''the idea-r-of it'', ''Australia and New Zealand'' becomes ''Australia-r-and New Zealand''. The typical alternative used by RP speakers is to insert a glottal stop where an intrusive R would otherwise be placed.
For non-rhotic speakers, what was historically a vowel plus is now usually realized as a
long vowel. So ''car'', ''hard'', ''fur'', ''born'' are phonetically , , , . This length is retained in phrases, so ''car owner'' is . But a final
schwa remains short, so ''water'' is . The vowels and (or ), when followed by ''r'', become diphthongs ending in schwa, so ''near'' is and ''poor'' is . The same happens to
diphthongs followed by R (or they end in in rhotic speech and that sound turns into a schwa as usual in non-rhotic speech): ''tire'' is and ''sour'' is (''
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary''). For some speakers some long vowels alternate with a
diphthong ending in schwa, so ''wear'' is but ''wearing'' is . Some pairs of words with distinct pronunciations in rhotic accents are
homophones in many non-rhotic accents. Examples in
Received Pronunciation include ''father'' and ''farther''; ''draws'' and ''drawers''; ''formally'' and ''formerly''; ''area'' and ''airier''. In
Australian English, which has the
weak vowel merger, pairs like ''batted''/''battered'' or ''boxes''/''boxers'' are homonyms.
Syllabication interacts with rhoticity: ''sheer'' and ''
Shi'a'' respectively have one and two
syllables; in some non-rhotic speech, this may be insufficient for distinguishing them.
The red areas are those where non-rhotic pronunciation is found among some whites in the
United States.
AAVE-influenced non-rhotic pronunciations may be found among African-Americans throughout the country. Map based on Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006:48)
Distribution of rhotic and non-rhotic accents
Examples of rhotic accents are:
Mid-Ulster English and
General American. Non-rhotic accents include
Received Pronunciation, and
Australian,
South African and
Estuary English.
Most speakers of
American English are rhotic. Outside the United States, rhotic accents can be found in
Barbados,
Canada,
Ireland and
Scotland. In
England, rhotic accents are found in the
West Country, the
Corby area and most of
Lancashire; they were traditionally across the whole of Lancashire and bordering parts of Yorkshire,
Northumberland and rural parts of south-east England, although the younger generation are more likely to be non-rhotic in these areas. Other areas with rhotic accents include
India (particularly in southern India and
Maharashtra where the Rs are
rolled),
the Philippines, and
Otago and
Southland in the far south of New Zealand's
South Island, where a Scottish influence is apparent.
Areas with non-rhotic accents include
Africa,
Australia,
Malta, most of the
Caribbean, most of
England (notably
Received Pronunciation speakers), most of
New Zealand and
Wales.
Singapore,
Malaysia and
Hong Kong are mostly non-rhotic.
Canada is entirely rhotic except for small isolated areas in southwestern
New Brunswick, parts of
Newfoundland, and
Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.
In the United States, large parts of
the South were formerly non-rhotic, but this is sharply recessive. Today, non-rhoticity in
Southern American English is found primarily among older speakers, and only in some areas such as
New Orleans, southern
Alabama,
Savannah, Georgia, and
Norfolk, Virginia (Labov, Ash, and Bomberg 2006: 47–48). Parts of
New England are non-rhotic as well as
New York City and surrounding areas. The case of New York is especially interesting because of a classic study in
sociolinguistics by
William Labov showing that the non-rhotic accent is associated with older and middle- and lower-class speakers, and is being replaced by the rhotic accent.
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is largely non-rhotic.
There are a few accents of
Southern American English where intervocalic is deleted before an
unstressed syllable and at the end of a word even when the following word begins with a vowel. In such accents, pronunciations like for ''
Carolina'' and for "bear up" are heard (Harris 2006: 2–5). These pronunciations also occur in AAVE (Pollock et al. 1998)
Speakers of non-rhotic accents who are trying to speak with a rhotic accent such as General American will often add an after vowels which are long in their native speech even when there has never been an there; an example would be
Liverpudlian Paul McCartney's performance of
Till There Was You on the album
With The Beatles, where he sings "There were birds in the sky, | But I never sawr them winging, | No, I never sawr them at all, | Till there was you." (assuming that he didn't do so on purpose).
Similar phenomena in other languages
The rhotic consonant is dropped or vocalised under similar conditions in other Germanic languages, notably
German and
Danish. In most varieties of German, /r/ in the
syllable coda is frequently realised as a vowel or a
semivowel, or , especially in the unstressed ending ''-er'' and after long vowels: for example ''sehr'' [], ''besser'' []. Similarly, Danish /r/ after a vowel is, unless preceded by a stressed vowel, either pronounced as (''mor'' "mother" , ''næring'' "nourishment" ) or merged with the preceding vowel while usually influencing its
quality ( and / are realised as long vowels and , and , and are all pronounced as ) (''løber'' "runner" , ''
Søren Kierkegaard'' (personal name) ) .
Among the
Turkic languages,
Uyghur displays more or less the same feature, as syllable-final /r/ is dropped, while the preceding vowel is lengthened: for example ''Uyghurlar'' [] ‘Uyghurs’. The /r/ may, however, sometimes be pronounced in unusually "careful" or "pedantic" speech; in such cases, it is often mistakenly inserted after long vowels even when there is no phonemic /r/ there.
Similarly in
Yaqui, an indigenous language of northern
Mexico, intervocalic or syllable-final /r/ is often dropped with lengthening of the previous vowel: ''pariseo'' becomes //, ''sewaro'' becomes /sewajo/.
In some dialects of
Brazilian Portuguese, word-final /r/ is unpronounced or becomes simply and aspiration, while in Thai, pre-consonantal /r/ is unpronounced.
See also
★
Rhotacism
★
Rhotic consonant
★
R-colored vowel
★
Linking R
★
Vocalic r
References
★ Harris, John. 2006.
"Wide-domain ''r''-effects in English" (pdf). Accessed March 24, 2007.
★ Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. ''The Atlas of North American English''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8.
★ Pollock, K., et al. 1998. "
Phonological Features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)". Accessed March 24, 2007.
External links
★
Chapter 7 of the ''Atlas of North American English'' by
William Labov et al., dealing with rhotic and non-rhotic accents in the U.S. (PDF file)
★
Rhotic vs non-rhotic, intrusive "r" from the alt.usage.english
newsgroup's
FAQ
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
