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Rhoticity in English

Pronunciation of 'r' across English dialects

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The rhotic dialects of English include most of those in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada. 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, rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic is deleted depending on an array of social factors, 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 rhotic or variably rhotic. Dialects of English that stably show variable rhoticity or semi-rhoticity also exist around the world, including many dialects of India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean.

Evidence from written documents suggests that loss of postvocalic began sporadically in England during the mid-15th century, but those -less spellings were uncommon and were restricted to private documents, especially those written by women. In the mid-18th century, postvocalic 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, some southern and eastern American port cities with close connections to Britain dropped postvocalic due to British English influence, thus causing their upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic, while other American regions remained rhotic. 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. 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, 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.

History

Southeastern England

The earliest traces of a loss of in English appear in the early 15th century. First, they occur before coronal consonants, especially , giving modern ass 'buttocks' (Old English: ears, Middle English: ers or ars), and bass (fish) (OE bærs, ME bars). A second phase of the loss of during that same century was characterized by sporadic and lexically variable deletion, such as monyng 'morning' and cadenall 'cardinal'. Both types of evidence come from southeastern England. Those spellings without 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 in the standard language before the mid-18th century, and many did not fully accept it until around 1800.

During the mid-17th century, several sources described as being weakened but still present. The English playwright Ben Jonson's English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640, recorded that was "sounded firme in the beginning of words, and more liquid in the middle, and ends." The next major documentation of the pronunciation of appeared a century later, in 1740, when the British author of a primer for French students of southern English said that "in many words r before a consonant is greatly softened, almost mute, and slightly lengthens the preceding vowel."

By the 1770s, pre-consonantal -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.

Elsewhere in England

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 and Kent, where rhoticity has since disappeared. The Atlas Linguarum Europae found that there was still rhoticity in the West Yorkshire site of Golcar as late as 1976. A study published in 2014 found that there is still some rhoticity amongst older residents of Berwick upon Tweed and Carlisle, both of which are close to the border with rhotic Scotland, but that this was absent from the majority of inhabitants.

United States

The loss of postvocalic 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, Washington D.C., Charleston, and Savannah. Like regional dialects in England, however, the accents of other areas in the United States remained rhotic in a display of linguistic "lag", which preserved the original pronunciation of .

Non-rhotic pronunciation continued to influence American prestige speech until the American Civil War of the 1860s began shifting the United States centers of wealth and political power to areas with fewer cultural connections to the old colonial and British elites. Still, the non-rhotic prestige persisted in the Eastern United States and among the upper class even into the early 20th century, by which time many speakers of the East and South were non-rhotic or variably rhotic, often even regardless of their class background.

The most decisive shift of the general American population towards rhoticity (even in previously non-rhotic regions) followed the Second World War. For instance, rapidly after the 1940s, the standard broadcasting pronunciation heard in national radio and television became firmly rhotic, aligned more with the General American English of Midwestern, Western, and non-coastal Americans. The prestige of non-rhoticity thus reversed, with non-rhoticity in the 20th century up until today increasingly associated with lower-class rather than higher-class speakers, as in New York City.

The biggest strongholds of non-rhoticity in the United States have always been eastern New England, New York City, and the former plantation region of the South: a band from the South's Atlantic Coast west to the Mississippi River. However, non-rhoticity has been notably declining in all three of these areas since the mid-20th century. In fact, a strongly articulated /r/, alongside full rhoticity, has been dominant throughout the South since then. African-American Vernacular English, meanwhile, continues to be largely non-rhotic since most African Americans originate from the former plantation region, where non-rhotic speech dominated in the past.

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