5 - Rhoticity

Summary

The generally more distinct utterance of Americans preserves a number of consonants that have begun to decay in Standard English … In 1913 the late Robert Bridges belaboured the English clergy for saying ‘the sawed of the Laud’ instead of ‘the sword of the Lord’ … The violent Anglophile, Henry James, revisiting the United States after many years in England, was so distressed by this clear sounding of r, that he denounced it as a ‘morose grinding of the back teeth’.

Mencken (1919)

The feature in question is postvocalic r. This is the r in words like ‘guard’, ‘art’, ‘lord’ and ‘fourth’, and at the end of words like ‘floor’, ‘far’ and ‘rider’.

In line with our popular beliefs about accents, a basic dichotomy can be set up about how people pronounce words like these in English. It is often said that English speakers of English drop their rs, and, in contrast to this, Americans pronounce all the rs that appear in the written language. The accents are r-less and r-full, respectively.

Even folk perceptions are more fine-grained than this, however, and within Britain there is an awareness that Scottish, Irish and West Country accents are r-full. As mentioned in chapter one, for English English speakers r-fullness has a social meaning, not only of transatlantic English, but, at home, of both rusticity and bucolic genuineness. Accordingly, it is sometimes used to advertise such wholesome products as ‘butter’ and ‘cider’.