Rhoticity in English

Examples of a rhotic and a non-rhotic speaker

Rhotic (American) speaker

/ˈfɑrmər/ for farmer

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Non-rhotic (British) speaker

/ˈfɑːmə/ for farmer

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The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant, /r/, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel.^[1][2] 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/.^[a] 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 preserve the /r/ in that position (the linking R) since it is followed by a vowel in this case.^[5]

The rhotic dialects of English include most of those in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada. As of the 21st century, the non-rhotic dialects include most of those in England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States,^[6][2] rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors,^[7] such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts. These correlations have varied through the last two centuries, and in many cases speakers of traditionally non-rhotic American dialects are now variably rhotic. Variably rhotic or semi-rhotic dialects also exist around the world, including many English dialects of India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean.

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.^[2] 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.^[8]

In the 18th century and possibly the 17th century, the loss of postvocalic /r/ in some British English influenced southern and eastern American port cities with close connections to Britain, causing their upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic, while other American regions remained rhotic.^[9] Non-rhoticity then became the norm more widely in many eastern and southern regions of the United States, as well as generally prestigious, until the 1860s, when the American Civil War began to shift American centers of wealth and political power to rhotic areas, which had fewer cultural connections to the old colonial and British elites.^[10] Non-rhotic American speech continued to hold some level of prestige up until the mid-20th century, but rhotic speech in particular became rapidly prestigious nationwide after World War II,^[11] for example as reflected in the national standard of mass media (like radio, film, and television) being firmly rhotic since the mid-20th century onwards.

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