Rhoticity in English

History

The earliest traces of a loss of /r/ in English appear in the early 15th century and occur before coronal consonants, especially /s/, giving modern "ass (buttocks)" (Old English ears, Middle English ers or ars), and "bass (fish)" (OE bærs, ME bars). A second phase of /r/-loss began during the 15th century, and was characterized by sporadic and lexically variable deletion, such as monyng "morning" and cadenall "cardinal". These /r/-less spellings appear throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but are uncommon and are restricted to private documents, especially ones written by women. No English authorities describe loss of /r/ in the standard language prior to the mid-18th century, and many do not fully accept it until the 1790s.

During the mid-17th century, a number of sources describe /r/ as being weakened but still present. The English playwright Ben Jonson's English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640, records that /r/ was "sounded firme in the beginning of words, and more liquid in the middle, and ends." Little more is said regarding /r/ until 1740, when one Mather Flint, writing in a primer for French learners of English, said: "...dans plusieurs mots, l’r devant une consonne est fort adouci, presque muet & rend un peu longue la voyale qui le precede." ("...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 more formal, educated speech. The English actor and linguist John Walker uses 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 end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783 reported surprise at the significant changes in fashionable pronunciation. By the early 19th century, the southern British standard was fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety, though it continued to be variable as late as the 1870s.

The adoption of postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation as the British prestige standard in the late 18th and early 19th centuries influenced American port cities with close connections to Britain, causing upper-class pronunciation in many eastern and southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah to become non-rhotic. Like regional dialects in England, the accents of other areas in America remained rhotic in a display of linguistic "lag" that 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 British elite. By 1870, New York City had become America's national center of commerce and entrepreneurship, and its political and economic leaders were increasingly self-made men with little connection to the old colonial elites and British non-rhotic pronunciation. This largely removed the prestige associated with non-rhotic pronunciation in America, such that when the advent of radio and television in the early 20th century established a national standard of American pronunciation, it became a rhotic variety that fully preserves historical /r/.

Modern pronunciation

In most non-rhotic accents, if a word ending in written "r" is followed closely by a word beginning with a vowel, the /r/ is pronounced—as in water ice. This 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). This so-called "intrusive R" has been stigmatized, but nowadays many speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) frequently "intrude" an epenthetic /r/ 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 formerly well-known India-r-Office and "Laura Norder" (Law and Order). 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 /r/ is now usually realized as a long vowel. This is called compensatory lengthening, lengthening that occurs after the elision of a sound. So in RP and many other non-rhotic accents card, fern, born are pronounced [kʰɑːd], [fɜːn], [bɔːn] or similar (actual pronunciations vary from accent to accent). This length may be retained in phrases, so while car pronounced in isolation is [kʰɑː], car owner is [ˈkʰɑːɹəʊnə]. But a final schwa usually remains short, so water in isolation is [wɔːtʰə]. In RP and similar accents the vowels /iː/ and /uː/ (or /ʊ/), when followed by r, become diphthongs ending in schwa, so near is [nɪə] and poor is [pʰʊə], though these 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, though these may be considered to end in /ər/ in rhotic speech, and it is the /ər/ that reduces to schwa as usual in non-rhotic speech: tire said in isolation is [tʰaɪə] and sour is [saʊə]. For some speakers, some long vowels alternate with a diphthong ending in schwa, so wear may be [wɛə] but wearing [wɛːɹɪŋ].

Even General American speakers commonly drop the /r/ in non-final unstressed syllables when another syllable in the same word also contains /r/; this 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, the /r/ sounds are all retained.

Distribution

Rhotic accents include Scottish English, Irish or Hiberno-English, most varieties of North American English, Barbadian English, Indian English, and Pakistani English.

Non-rhotic accents include most English English, Welsh English, New Zealand English, Australian English, and South African 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, in which speakers often sporadically waver between rhoticity and non-rhoticity without any particular rules of context, are also widely documented. Variably rhotic accents comprise much of Caribbean English, for example, as spoken in Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, and the Bahamas. They also include current-day New York City English, New York Latino English, and some Boston English.

Non-rhotic accents in the Americas include the rest of Caribbean and Belize.

England

Though most English varieties in England are non-rhotic, rhotic accents are found in the West Country (south and west of a line from near Shrewsbury to around Portsmouth), the Corby area, some of Lancashire (north and west of the centre of Manchester), some parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and in the areas that border Scotland. The prestige form, however, exerts a steady pressure towards non-rhoticity. Thus the urban speech of Bristol or Southampton is more accurately described as variably rhotic, the degree of rhoticity being reduced as one moves up the class and formality scales.

United States

American English is predominantly rhotic today, but at the end of the 19th century non-rhotic accents were common throughout much of the Eastern U.S. and through much of the South along the Gulf Coast. This trend reversed during the mid-20th century, in large part due to the influence of more western-influenced television, as well as the increasing political influence of states to the west (the Upper Midwest, and then California and Texas). Non-rhotic pronunciations have increasingly been perceived by Americans as sounding foreign with rhotic accents increasingly seen as sounding American.

Today, non-rhoticity in the American South 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. The local dialects of eastern New England, especially Boston, Massachusetts, extending into the states of Maine and New Hampshire, are largely non-rhotic, as well as the traditional Rhode Island dialect; however, this feature has recently been receding. The New York City dialect is traditionally non-rhotic, though William Labov more precisely classifies its current form as variably rhotic, with many of its sub-varieties now fully rhotic, such as in northeastern New Jersey.

African American Vernacular English 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, so that "Mister Adams" is pronounced [mɪstə(ʔ)ˈædəmz]. In a few such accents, intervocalic /r/ is deleted before an unstressed syllable even within a word when the following syllable begins with a vowel. In such accents, pronunciations like [kæəˈlaːnə] for Carolina, or [bɛːˈʌp] for "bear up" are heard. This pronunciation also occurs in AAVE. This also occurred for many older non-rhotic Southern speakers.

Typically, even non-rhotic modern American English varieties do pronounce the /r/ in /ɜːr/ (as in "bird," "work," or "perky"), realizing it, as in most of the U.S., as [ɝ] or [ɚ]  listen.

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.

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. Some Māori speakers are semi-rhotic although it is not clearly identified to any particular region or attributed to any defined language shift. The Māori accent varies from the European-origin New Zealand accent.

Asia

The English spoken in Asia is predominantly rhotic. Many varieties of Indian English are rhotic owing to the underlying phonotactics of the native Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages whilst some tend to be non-rhotic. In the case of the Philippines, this may be explained because the English that is spoken there is heavily influenced by the American dialect. In addition, many East Asians (in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) who have a good command of English generally have rhotic accents because of the influence of American English. This excludes Hong Kong, whose RP English dialect is a result of its almost 150-year-history as a British Crown colony (later British dependent territory). However, many older (and younger) speakers among South and East Asians speak non-rhotic.

Other Asian regions with non-rhotic English are Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. A typical Malaysian's English would be almost totally non-rhotic due to the nonexistence of rhotic endings in both languages of influence, whereas a more educated Malaysian's English may be non-rhotic due to Standard Malaysian English being based on RP (Received Pronunciation).

A typical teenager's Southeast Asian English would be rhotic, mainly because of 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 Africa (excluding South Africa) is based on British RP and is officially 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 is primarily non-rhotic as are the underlying varieties of Niger-Congo languages spoken in that part of West Africa. Rhoticity may be present in English spoken in areas where 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 African American influence on African English pronunciation particularly among younger urban affluent populations, where the American rhotic 'r' may be over-stressed in informal communication to create a pseudo-Americanised accent. By and large official spoken English used in post colonial African countries is non-rhotic. Standard Liberian English is also non-rhotic because liquids are lost at the end of words or before consonants.

Mergers characteristic of non-rhotic accents

Some phonemic mergers are characteristic of non-rhotic accents. These usually include one item that historically contained an R (lost in the non-rhotic accent), and one that never did so. The section below lists mergers in order of approximately decreasing prevalence.

In the terminology of John C. Wells, this consists of the merger of the lexical sets commA and lettER. It is found in all or nearly all non-rhotic accents, and is even present in some accents that are in other respects rhotic, such as those of some speakers in Jamaica and the Bahamas.