Information AboutNon-rhotic |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT RHOTIC AND NON-RHOTIC ACCENTS | |
| english phonology | |
| english dialects | |
| splits and mergers in english phonology | |
| american english | |
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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 , 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.]] 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 '' respectively have one and two Syllable s; 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 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 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) |
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