Rhoticity in English facts for kids
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant /r/ by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieties, the historical English /r/ sound is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the /r/ sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/.
When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the /r/ in that position (the linking R) since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
The rhotic varieties of English include the dialects of South West England, Scotland, Ireland, and most of the United States and Canada. The non-rhotic varieties include most of the dialects of modern England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In some varieties, such as those of some parts of the Southern and Northeastern United States, rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic r is deleted depending on an array of social factors, such as being more correlated today with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, certain ethnic identities, and less formal speaking contexts.
Evidence from written documents suggests that loss of postvocalic /r/ began sporadically in England during the mid-15th century, but those /r/-less spellings were uncommon and were restricted to private documents, especially those written by women. In the mid-18th century, postvocalic /r/ was still pronounced in most environments, but by the 1740s to the 1770s, it was often deleted entirely, especially after low vowels. By the early 19th century, the southern British standard was fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety, but some variation persisted as late as the 1870s.
In the 18th century and possibly the 17th century, the loss of postvocalic /r/ in British English influenced southern and eastern American port cities with close connections to Britain and caused their upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic, but the rest of the United States remained rhotic. Non-rhotic pronunciation continued to influence American prestige speech until the 1860s, when the American Civil War began to shift America's centers of wealth and political power to rhotic areas, which had fewer cultural connections to the old colonial and British elites. In the United States, non-rhotic speech continued to hold some level of prestige up until the mid-20th century, but rhotic speech in particular became prestigious nationwide rapidly after the World War II, as is reflected in the national standard, which has embraced historical /r/, of radio and television since the mid-20th century.
Contents
History
England
The earliest traces of a loss of /r/ in English appear in the early 15th century and occur before coronal consonants, especially /s/. A second phase of the loss of /r/ began during the 15th century and was characterized by sporadic and lexically variable deletion, such as monyng 'morning' and cadenall 'cardinal'. Those spellings without /r/ appeared throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but they were uncommon and were restricted to private documents, especially those written by women. No English authorities described loss of /r/ in the standard language before the mid-18th century, and many did not fully accept it until the 1790s.
During the mid-17th century, several sources described /r/ as being weakened but still present. The English playwright Ben Jonson's English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640, recorded that /r/ was "sounded firme in the beginning of words, and more liquid in the middle, and ends." The next major documentation of the pronunciation of /r/ appeared a century later, in 1740, when the British author of a primer for French students of English said that "in many words r before a consonant is greatly softened, almost mute, and slightly lengthens the preceding vowel."
By the 1770s, postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation was becoming common around London even in formal educated speech. The English actor and linguist John Walker used the spelling ar to indicate the long vowel of aunt in his 1775 rhyming dictionary. In his influential Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), Walker reported, with a strong tone of disapproval, that "the r in lard, bard,... is pronounced so much in the throat as to be little more than the middle or Italian a, lengthened into baa, baad...." Americans returning to England after the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783, reported surprise at the significant changes in the fashionable pronunciation that had taken place.
By the early 19th century, the southern English standard had been fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety, but it continued to be variable in the 1870s. The extent of rhoticity in England in the mid-19th century is summarized as widespread in the book New Zealand English: its Origins and Evolution:
[T]he only areas of England... for which we have no evidence of rhoticity in the mid-nineteenth century lie in two separate corridors. The first runs south from the North Riding of Yorkshire through the Vale of York into north and central Lincolnshire, nearly all of Nottinghamshire, and adjacent areas of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Staffordshire. The second includes all of Norfolk, western Suffolk and Essex, eastern Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, Middlesex, and northern Surrey and Kent.
In the late 19th century, Alexander John Ellis found evidence of accents being overwhelmingly rhotic in urban areas that are now firmly non-rhotic, such as Birmingham and the Black Country, and Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
The Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s and the 1960s recorded rhotic or partially-rhotic accents in almost every part of England, including in the counties of West Yorkshire, East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cumbria, and Kent, where rhoticity has since disappeared.
United States
The loss of postvocalic /r/ in the British prestige standard in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries influenced the American port cities with close connections to Britain, which caused upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic in many eastern and southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah. Like regional dialects in England, however, the accents of other areas in America remained rhotic in a display of linguistic "lag," which preserved the original pronunciation of /r/.
Non-rhotic pronunciation continued to influence American prestige speech until the 1860s, when the American Civil War shifted America's centers of wealth and political power to areas with fewer cultural connections to the old colonial and British elites. That largely removed the prestige associated with non-rhotic pronunciation in America. Those colonial influences may be the reason that African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is largely non-rhotic today since former slaves migrated across the United States from southern regions, where non-rhotic speech would have been prestigious.
The standard broadcasting pronunciation of national radio and television in the early 20th century favored rhoticity, aligned more with Midwestern and non-coastal Americans, and thus preserved historical /r/. The increased prestige of rhotic American accents further accelerated after World War II.
Modern pronunciation
In most non-rhotic accents, if a word ending in written "r" is followed immediately by a word beginning with a vowel, the /r/ is pronounced, as in water ice. That phenomenon is referred to as "linking R." Many non-rhotic speakers also insert an epenthetic /r/ between vowels when the first vowel is one that can occur before syllable-final r (drawring for drawing). The so-called "intrusive R" has been stigmatized, but many speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) now frequently "intrude" an epenthetic /r/ at word boundaries, especially if 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 formerly well-known India-r-Office and "Laura Norder" (Law and Order). The typical alternative used by RP speakers (and some rhotic speakers as well) is to insert a glottal stop wherever an intrusive r would otherwise have been placed.
For non-rhotic speakers, what was once a vowel, followed by /r/, is now usually realized as a long vowel. That is called compensatory lengthening, which occurs after the elision of a sound. In RP and many other non-rhotic accents card, fern, born are thus pronounced [kɑːd], [fɜːn], [bɔːn] or similar (actual pronunciations vary from accent to accent). That length may be retained in phrases and so car pronounced in isolation is [kɑː], but car owner is [ˈkɑːrəʊnə]. However, a final schwa usually remains short and so water in isolation is [wɔːtə]. In RP and similar accents, the vowels /iː/ and /uː/ (or /ʊ/), when they are followed by r, become diphthongs that end in schwa and so near is [nɪə] and poor is [pʊə]. However, they have other realizations as well, including monophthongal ones. Once again, the pronunciations vary from accent to accent. The same happens to diphthongs followed by r, but they may be considered to end in rhotic speech in /ər/, which reduces to schwa, as usual, in non-rhotic speech. Thus, in isolation, tire, is pronounced [taɪə] and sour is [saʊə]. For some speakers, some long vowels alternate with a diphthong ending in schwa and so wear may be [wɛə] but wearing [ˈwɛːrɪŋ].
The compensatory lengthening view is challenged by Wells, who stated that during the 17th century, stressed vowels followed by /r/ and another consonant or word boundary underwent a lengthening process, known as pre-r lengthening. The process was not a compensatory lengthening process but an independent development, which explains modern pronunciations featuring both [ɜː] (bird, fur) and [ɜːr] (stirring, stir it) according to their positions: [ɜːr] was the regular outcome of the lengthening, which shortened to [ɜː] after r-dropping occurred in the 18th century. The lengthening involved "mid and open short vowels" and so the lengthening of /ɑː/ in car was not a compensatory process caused by r-dropping.
Even General American commonly drops the /r/ in non-final unstressed syllables if another syllable in the same word also contains /r/, which may be referred to as r-dissimilation. Examples include the dropping of the first /r/ in the words surprise, governor, and caterpillar. In more careful speech, however, all /r/ sounds are still retained.
Distribution
[ə] (non-rhotic) [əʴ] (alveolar) [əʵ] (retroflex) [əʵː] (retroflex & long) [əʶ] (uvular) [ɔʶ] (back & rounded)
Rhotic accents include most varieties of Scottish English, Irish or Hiberno-English, Canadian English, American English, Barbadian English and Philippine English.
Non-rhotic accents include most varieties of English English, Welsh English, New Zealand English, Australian English, South African English, Nigerian English, Trinidadian and Tobagonian English, Standard Malaysian English and Singaporean English.
Semi-rhotic accents have also been studied, such as Jamaican English, in which r is pronounced (as in even non-rhotic accents) before vowels, but also in stressed monosyllables or stressed syllables at the ends of words (e.g. in "car" or "dare"); however, it is not pronounced at the end of unstressed syllables (e.g. in "water") or before consonants (e.g. "market").
Variably rhotic accents are also widely documented, in which deletion of r (when not before vowels) is optional; in these dialects the probability of deleting r may vary depending on social, stylistic, and contextual factors. Variably rhotic accents comprise much of Indian English, Pakistani English, and Caribbean English, for example, as spoken in Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, and the Bahamas. They also include current-day New York City English, most modern varieties of Southern American English, New York Latino English, and some Eastern New England English, as well as some varieties of Scottish English.
Non-rhotic accents in the Americas include those of the rest of the Caribbean and Belize. Additionally, there are people with non-rhotic accents who are children of at least one rhotic-accented parent but grew up, or were educated, in non-rhotic countries like Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa, or Wales. By contrast, people who have at least one non-rhotic-accented parent but were raised or started their education in Canada, any rhotic Caribbean country, Ireland, Scotland, or the United States speak with rhotic accents.
England
Most English varieties in England are non-rhotic today, which stems from a trend in southeastern England and accelerated in the very late 18th century onwards, rhotic accents are still found in the West Country (south and west of a line from near Shrewsbury to around Portsmouth, including parts of the West Midlands), the Corby area (because of migration from Scotland in the 1930s), some of Lancashire (north and west of the centre of Manchester, increasingly among older and rural speakers only), some parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and in the areas that border Scotland. The prestige form, however, exerts a steady pressure toward non-rhoticity. Thus, the urban speech of Bristol, Southampton or Exeter is more accurately described as variably rhotic, the degree of rhoticity being reduced as one moves up the class and formality scales.
Scotland
Most Scottish accents are rhotic, but non-rhotic speech has been reported in Edinburgh since the 1970s and Glasgow since the 1980s.
Wales
Welsh English is mostly non-rhotic, but variable rhoticity is present in accents influenced by Welsh, especially in North Wales. Additionally, while Port Talbot English is largely non-rhotic, some speakers may supplant the front vowel of bird with /ɚ/.
United States
American English is now predominantly rhotic, but in the late 19th century, non-rhotic accents were common throughout much of the coastal Eastern and Southern United States, including along the Gulf Coast. In fact, non-rhotic accents were established in all major U.S. cities along the Atlantic coast except for the Delaware Valley area, centered on Philadelphia and Baltimore, because of its early Scots-Irish rhotic influence. After the American Civil War and even more intensely during the early-to-mid-20th century (presumably correlated with the Second World War), rhotic accents began to gain social prestige nationwide, even in the aforementioned areas that were traditionally non-rhotic. Thus, non-rhotic accents are increasingly perceived by Americans as sounding foreign or less educated because of an association with working-class or immigrant speakers in Eastern and Southern cities, and rhotic accents are increasingly perceived as sounding more "General American."
Today, non-rhoticity in the American South among whites is found primarily among older speakers and only in some areas such as central and southern Alabama; Savannah, Georgia; and Norfolk, Virginia, as well as in the Yat accent of New Orleans. However, it is still very common all across the South and across all age groups among African American speakers. The local dialects of eastern New England, especially that of Boston, Massachusetts but also those extending into the states of Maine and (less so) New Hampshire, show some non-rhoticity along with the traditional Rhode Island dialect, although this feature has been receding in recent generations. The New York City dialect has traditionally been non-rhotic, but William Labov more precisely classifies its current form as variably rhotic, with many of its sub-varieties actually being fully rhotic, such as that of northeastern New Jersey.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is largely non-rhotic, and in some non-rhotic Southern and AAVE accents, there is no linking r; that is, /r/ at the end of a word is deleted even when the following word starts with a vowel; thus, "Mister Adams" is pronounced [mɪstə(ʔ)ˈædəmz]. In a few such accents, intervocalic /r/ is deleted before an unstressed syllable even within a word if the following syllable begins with a vowel. In such accents, pronunciations like [kæəˈlaːnə] for Carolina, or [bɛːˈʌp] for "bear up" are heard. This pronunciation occurs in AAVE and also occurred for many older non-rhotic Southern speakers. Nonetheless, AAVE spoken in areas in which non-AAVE speakers are rhotic is likelier to be rhotic, and rhoticity is also generally more common among younger AAVE-speakers.
Typically, even non-rhotic modern varieties of American English pronounce the /r/ in /ɜr/ (as in "bird," "work," or "perky") and realize it, as in most rhotic varieties, as [ɚ] (an r-colored mid central vowel) or [əɹ] (a sequence of a mid central vowel and a postalveolar or retroflex approximant).
Canada
Canadian English is entirely rhotic except for small isolated areas in southwestern New Brunswick, parts of Newfoundland, and the Lunenburg English variety spoken in Lunenburg and Shelburne Counties, Nova Scotia, which may be non-rhotic or variably rhotic.
Ireland
The prestige form of English spoken in Ireland is rhotic and most regional accents are rhotic, but some regional accents, particularly in the area around counties Louth and Cavan are notably non-rhotic and many non-prestige accents have touches of non-rhoticity. In Dublin, the traditional local dialect is largely non-rhotic, but the more modern varieties, referred to by Hickey as "mainstream Dublin English" and "fashionable Dublin English", are fully rhotic. Hickey used that as an example of how English in Ireland does not follow prestige trends in England.
Asia
The English spoken in Asia is predominantly rhotic. In the case of the Philippines, that may be explained because Philippine English is heavily influenced by the American dialect and because of Spanish influence in the various Philippine languages. In addition, many East Asians (in Mainland China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) who have a good command of English generally have rhotic accents because of the influence of American English. That excludes Hong Kong, whose English dialect is a result of its almost 150-year history as a British Crown colony and later a British dependent territory).l The lack of consonant /r/ in Cantonese also contributes to the phenomenon, but has rhoticity started to exist because of the handover in 1997 and influence by the US and East Asian entertainment industries. However, many older (and younger) speakers among South and East Asians have a non-rhotic accent. Speakers of Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, etc), Turkic (Turkish, Azeri, etc), Iranian languages (Persian, Kurdish, etc) in West Asia also speak English with a rhotic pronunciation because of the inherent phonotactics of their native languages.
Indian English is variably rhotic and can vary between being non-rhotic by most education systems being based on British English or rhotic from the underlying phonotactics of the native Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and the influence of American English. Other Asian regions with non-rhotic English are Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. A typical Malaysian's English would be almost totally non-rhotic because of the nonexistence of rhotic endings in both languages of influence, but a more educated Malaysian's English may be non-rhotic because Standard Malaysian English is based on RP (Received Pronunciation). The classical English spoken in Brunei is non-rhotic, but one change that seems to be taking place is that Brunei English is now becoming rhotic from the influence of American English; from the influence of Standard Malay, which is rhotic; and from influence of the languages of Indians in Brunei (Tamil and Punjabi). Rhoticity is also used by Chinese Bruneians, but the English in the neighboring Malaysia and Singapore remains non-rhotic. In Brunei English, rhoticity is equal to Philippine dialects of English and Scottish and Irish dialects. Non-rhoticity is mostly found in older generations; the phenomenon is almost similar to the status of American English, which has greatly reduced non-rhoticity.
A typical teenager's Southeast Asian English would be rhotic, mainly from the prominent influence by American English. Spoken English in Myanmar is non-rhotic, but there are a number of English speakers with a rhotic or partially-rhotic pronunciation. Sri Lankan English may be rhotic.
Africa
The English spoken in most of Africa is based on RP and is generally non-rhotic. Pronunciation and variation in African English accents are largely affected by native African language influences, level of education, and exposure to Western influences. The English accents spoken in the coastal areas of West Africa are primarily non-rhotic because of the underlying varieties of Niger-Congo languages that are spoken in that part of West Africa. Rhoticity may exist in the English that is spoken in the areas in which rhotic Afro-Asiatic or Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken across northern West Africa and in the Nilotic regions of East Africa. More modern trends show an increasing American influence on African English pronunciation particularly among younger urban affluent populations, which may overstress the American rhotic "r," which creates a pseudo-Americanised accent.
By and large, the official spoken English used in post-colonial African countries is non-rhotic. Standard Liberian English is also non-rhotic because its liquids are lost at the end of words or before consonants. South African English is mostly non-rhotic, especially in the Cultivated dialect, which is based on RP, except for some Broad varieties spoken in the Cape Province (typically in -er suffixes, as in writer). It appears that postvocalic /r/ is entering the speech of younger people under the influence of American English and perhaps of the Scottish dialect that was brought by the Scottish settlers.
Australia
Standard Australian English is non-rhotic. A degree of rhoticity has been observed in a particular sublect of the Australian Aboriginal English spoken on the coast of South Australia, especially in speakers from the Point Pearce and Raukkan settlements. These speakers realise /r/ as [ɹ] in the preconsonantal postvocalic position, after a vowel but before another a consonant, but only within stems: [boːɹd] "board", [tʃɜɹtʃ] "church", [pɜɹθ] "Perth"; but [flæː] "flour", [dɒktə] "doctor", [jɪəz] "years". It has been speculated that the feature may derive from the fact that many of the first settlers in coastal South Australia, including Cornish tin-miners, Scottish missionaries, and American whalers, spoke rhotic varieties.
New Zealand
Although New Zealand English is predominantly non-rhotic, Southland and parts of Otago in the far south of New Zealand's South Island are rhotic from apparent Scottish influence. Many Māori and Pasifika people, who tend to speak a specific dialect of English, also speak with a strong "r," but they are not the only ones to do so. Older Southland speakers use /ɹ/ variably after vowels, but younger speakers now use /ɹ/ only with the NURSE vowel and occasionally with the LETTER vowel. Younger Southland speakers pronounce /ɹ/ in third term /ˌθɵːɹd ˈtɵːɹm/ (General NZE pronunciation: /ˌθɵːd ˈtɵːm/) but sometimes in farm cart /fɐːm kɐːt/ (same as in General NZE). However, non-prevocalic /ɹ/ among non-rhotic speakers is sometimes pronounced in a few words, including Ireland /ˈɑɪəɹlənd/, merely /ˈmiəɹli/, err /ɵːɹ/, and the name of the letter R /ɐːɹ/ (General NZE pronunciations: /ˈɑɪələnd, ˈmiəli, ɵː, ɐː/). The Māori accent varies from the European-origin New Zealand accent. Some Māori speakers are semi-rhotic, but that feature is not clearly identified to any particular region or attributed to any defined language shift. The Māori language itself tends to pronounce "r" as usually an alveolar tap [ɾ], like in the Scottish dialect.
See also
- English-language vowel changes before historic /r/
