Everything about Non-rhotic totally explained
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. Rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it's 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 /r/ 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
The earliest traces of a loss of /r/ in English are found in the environment before /s/ 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 /r/ 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 [ɹ] in
red, and most pronounce it in
torrid and
watery (in each case the [ɹ] 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 [ɹ] is pronounced—as in
water ice. This phenomenon is referred to as "
linking R". Many non-rhotic speakers also insert
epenthetic [ɹ]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 [ɹ] 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 [ɹ] is now usually realized as a
long vowel. So
car,
hard,
fur,
born are phonetically /kɑː/, /hɑːd/, /fɜː/, /bɔːn/. This length is retained in phrases, so
car owner is /kɑːɹəʊnə/. But a final
schwa remains short, so
water is /wɔːtə/. The vowels /iː/ and /uː/ (or /ʊ/), when followed by
r, become diphthongs ending in schwa, so
near is /nɪə/ and
poor is /pʊə/. The same happens to
diphthongs followed by R (or they end in /ɚ/ in rhotic speech and that sound turns into a schwa as usual in non-rhotic speech):
tire is /taɪə/ and
sour is /saʊə/ (
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). For some speakers some long vowels alternate with a
diphthong ending in schwa, so
wear is /wɛə/ but
wearing is /wɛːɹiŋ/. 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 homophones.
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.
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
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
Australia, most of the
Caribbean, most of
England (notably
Received Pronunciation speakers), most of
New Zealand,
Wales, and
Singapore.
Canada is entirely rhotic except for small isolated areas in southwestern
New Brunswick, parts of
Newfoundland, and
Lunenburg and
Shelburne Counties, 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 (known endearingly as the
Yat accent), southern
Alabama,
Savannah, Georgia, and
Norfolk, Virginia (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 47–48). Parts of
New England, especially
Boston, 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 [ɹ] 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 [kæəlaːnə] for
Carolina and [bɛːʌp] for "bear up" are heard (Harris 2006: 2–5). These pronunciations also occur in AAVE (Pollock et al. 1998)
In
Asia, the
Philippines is the paramount example of rhotic dialect. This may be explained because the English that's spoken here's heavily influenced by the American dialect.
Similar phenomena in other languages
The rhotic consonant is dropped or vocalised under similar conditions in other Germanic languages, notably
German,
Danish and some dialects of southern Sweden (possibly due to the proximity to Denmark). In most varieties of German, /r/ in the
syllable coda is frequently realised as a vowel or a
semivowel, [ɐ] or [ɐ̯], especially in the unstressed ending
-er and after long vowels: for example
sehr [zeːɐ̯],
besser [ˈbɛsɐ]. Similarly, Danish /r/ after a vowel is, unless preceded by a stressed vowel, either pronounced as [ɐ̯] (
mor "mother" [moɐ̯ˀ],
næring "nourishment" [ˈnɛɐ̯eŋ]) or merged with the preceding vowel while usually influencing its
quality (/a(ː)r/ and /ɔːr/ / /ɔr/ are realised as long vowels [aː] and [ɒː], and /ər/, /rə/ and /rər/ are all pronounced as [ɐ]) (
løber "runner" [ˈløːb̥ɐ],
Søren Kierkegaard (personal name) [ˌsœːɐnˈkʰiɐ̯g̊əˌg̊ɒːˀ]).
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 [ʔʊɪ'ʁʊːlaː] ‘
Uyghurs’. The /r/ may, however, sometimes be pronounced in unusually "careful" or "pedantic" speech; in such cases, it's often
mistakenly inserted after long vowels even when there's 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 /pa:ˡseo/,
sewaro becomes /sewajo/.
In some dialects of
Brazilian Portuguese, word-final /r/ is unpronounced or becomes simply an aspiration (mostly in interior of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul states), while in
Thai, pre-consonantal /r/ is unpronounced.
Effect on spelling
Non-rhotic pronunciation can affect phonetic spelling of dialectal or foreign words. In addition to
juggernaut mentioned above, the following are found:
- British English slang words:
- "char" for "cha" from the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of 茶 (= "tea" (the drink))
- "nark" (= "informer") from Romany "nāk" (= "nose").
- In Rudyard Kipling's books:
- "dorg" instead of "dawg" for a drawled pronunciation of "dog".
- Hindu Indian god name Kama misspelled as "Karma".
- Hindustani कागज़ "kāgaz" (= "paper") spelled as "kargaz".
Further Information
Get more info on 'Non-rhotic'.
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