![]() ![]() Rhotic pronunciation is, for us, a quaint local feature, almost as quaint as boasting of your brand-new combine harrrvesterrr. ![]() ![]() More importantly, it is no longer smart to be non-rhotic. Bostonians and New Yorkers no longer drop r as resolutely as they once did (though you have only to watch episodes of Judge Judy from Massachusetts to see that there are still quite a few non-rhotic Americans around). In the States these pressures led to the spread of Midwestern-style rhoticity to communities that had previously been non-rhotic. They are under attack from two kinds of pressure: regional and social. And the way the upper crust speak is non-rhotic.īut both these rhotic areas are shrinking. Like any local accent in England, these are also associated with being working-class or lower-middle-class. The other is the vaguely defined West Country, with its ooh-aar burr, the popular stereotype of a Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Devon or Cornish accent. One is a small patch in Lancashire, where some older people in places like Blackburn and Accrington speak like this. areas where /r/ is retained before a consonant and finally, as in fa rme r. How different things are in England! Most of this country is non-rhotic, but we have two traditionally rhotic areas, i.e. It was interesting to read Ben Trawick-Smith’s discussion of the decline of non-rhoticity in American English (‘ The fall of the r-less class’). ![]()
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