Loss of Rhotacism.

October 17, 2023 by 38 Comments

Via r/MapPorn (“Map Porn, for interesting maps”), Do you pronounce the “r” in “arm”? England, 1950 vs. 2016. It’s just a map (well, two side by side), but it blew my mind — I had no idea the boat had rho’d that far out to sea. (Found at Facebook, but I figured Reddit was accessible to more readers.)

Comments

  1. mollymooly says
    October 17, 2023 at 1:43 pm

    Of course, self-reported answers to a yes/no question are less reliable than sound recordings analysed by trained phoneticians. But a good deal cheaper to gather.

  2. languagehat says
    October 17, 2023 at 1:55 pm

    And the likelihood of that sweeping a result from errors in self-reporting would seem to be infinitesimal.

  3. Y says
    October 17, 2023 at 2:05 pm

    How far does this pattern extend into Wales and Scotland?

  4. languagehat says
    October 17, 2023 at 2:13 pm

    You’ll have to ask our resident Scoto-Welshman. Calling DE!

  5. David Eddyshaw says
    October 17, 2023 at 2:38 pm

    Alas, I know not.

    I was actually surprised by the 1950 map, rather than the current one. I had no idea that the English r-lessness was so limited geographically, as recently as that.

    Here in Swansea, r-lessness in English seems now to be universal, as far as the locals go.

    My own speech is rhotic, and I’ve always assumed that all Scots keep to the Old Ways, but it may well be that my information is outdated.

    Jen will be able to say more, I expect.

  6. David L says
    October 17, 2023 at 3:15 pm

    One crucial datapoint: Stephen Merchant, b. 1974 in Bristol, is rhotic.

    Like DE, I was surprised by the 1950 map showing such extensive r-ness.

    And a question: I can imagine that some non-rhotic Englishpersons, if asked whether they pronounce the r in arm, would say they do, because without the r they would pronounce it like ‘am.’ Perhaps people have become more phonologically sophisticated since 1950.

  7. Jen in Edinburgh says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:12 pm

    I say arrum with two syllables, so don’t ask me!

    It’s not something I consciously notice, sorry – too much English English (and non-native English) round here.

    I like the little sliver of Northumberland around Coldstream, though.

    Someone in the reddit comments suggests that data for the second map came from an app, which might skew towards younger and more technologically confident speakers.

  8. languagehat says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:14 pm

    Ah, that would make sense. It might overstate the sweep of the change, but certainly doesn’t change the general picture.

  9. Jen in Edinburgh says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:17 pm

    This article has more maps, including ‘arm’ data for Scotland, and explains the data (30000 people who chose to download a dialect app)
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/an-increasing-number-of-british-people-don-t-pronounce-the-word-three-properly-these-maps-explain-why-a7079976.html

    The ‘splinter’ map is odd, since they appear not to have asked Scots about ‘skelf’

  10. languagehat says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:19 pm

    Thanks!

  11. David Eddyshaw says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:30 pm

    There’s a comment by an Edinburgher on the Reddit thing saying that they had previously not actually noticed that English people say “ahm.”

    This reminds me of my own somewhat disconcerting discovery that two of my colleagues, speakers of the local Welsh dialect, actually couldn’t hear any difference at all between the north Welsh and south Welsh pronunciations of u (southerners pronounce it exactly like i, northerners have [ɨ̞], which contrasts with i [i].) One is used to the idea that speakers can’t hear subphonemic differences in their own speech, but it hadn’t occurred to me that also means that they hear other dialects of their language as if the phonemes were distributed in the same way as in their own speech; on reflection, that’s not really surprising.

  12. Keith Ivey says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:39 pm

    Shouldn’t they have had an option for “three” with dental [t] if they’re including Ireland?

  13. David Eddyshaw says
    October 17, 2023 at 4:49 pm

    “Free” for “three” in Glasgow has been a thing for a while.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_dialect

    Apparently some younger speakers are non-rhotic too. I blame violent video games.

  14. J.W. Brewer says
    October 17, 2023 at 5:07 pm

    I was listening to an interview with the legendary rock guitarist Mick Ralphs, who was born in 1944 in Herefordshire near the Welsh border and who I believe mostly lived there until he first became a rock star in his mid-twenties, although maybe he and his Herefordshire bandmates moved to London a few years earlier when they were still unknown and struggling. It’s interesting because the rhoticism seems to flicker in and out with some candidate words exhibiting it and others not. Not sure if the alternation is some subtle Wye Valley dialect pattern that’s not immediately obvious to me, or the result of him having lived away from the rhotic borderlands for a long long time now and his accent thus being a mix of where he grew up and who he was subsequently surrounded with. (The interview was from 2015, about a year before the stroke that seems to have permanently destroyed his ability to play the guitar.)

  15. Y says
    October 17, 2023 at 7:31 pm

    If people pronounce “lava” and “larva” equally, would they say they are non-rhotic whether they truly are, or whether they put excrescent r’s everywhere? In other words, can people distinguish the fact of the merger from its phonetic realization?

  16. Bathrobe says
    October 17, 2023 at 8:01 pm

    It’s sad but I guess inevitable that rhotacism is dying out in regional varieties in the UK, just as it is sad but probably also inevitable that the reverse process is taking place in North America.

    There is a possibility, of course, that non-rhotacism will eventually be rolled back worldwide under US influence. I noticed the other day an advertisement in Australia where the young obviously Australian speaker was sounding his postvocalic r’s, the sure sign of perceived prestige for young people.

  17. Jonathan D says
    October 17, 2023 at 8:41 pm

    Collecting through an app no doubt has a bias towards younger people, but reading the description in the uni’s news page about these results of the 50s data as being “from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s” makes me think it probably deliberately selected with an opposite bias, adding to the way the maps exaggerate the (no doubt real) changes.

    In fact, this paper on the app starts by point out the “non-mobile, older, rural, male” focus of the 50s study. The paper also identifies a white ethnicity bias in respondents as well as youth (and high levels of education, which would be highly correlated)

    I suppose rural dialects might have been seen as more “authentic” because urban ones were more often influenced by mobility. But I was also struck by the mention that in younger people around Bristol, rhoticity is now an urban characteristic.

  18. J.W. Brewer says
    October 17, 2023 at 9:01 pm

    If we accept that e.g. “West-Country-ness” has proven not to be a strong enough identity/culture to preserve rhoticism against the tides of standardization, what are the odds (and this is a genuine question not a rhetorical one) that Scottishness or Welshness or Irishness will be sufficiently well-rooted as identities/cultures to successfully resist assimilation to the non-rhotic practices of the Sassenach? Do “national” boundaries matter more because they also mark territorial boundaries between different school systems (with differently-aligned prescriptive teachers) and the like, or is the cross-border effect of London-centric mass media and pop culture etc. a strong enough factor to swamp that?

  19. David Eddyshaw says
    October 17, 2023 at 9:25 pm

    I noticed the other day an advertisement in Australia where the young obviously Australian speaker was sounding his postvocalic r’s, the sure sign of perceived prestige for young people

    Where I lead, the masses follow.

  20. MMcM says
    October 17, 2023 at 10:39 pm

    There is also the maybe real / maybe imagined / maybe exaggerating young Australian NAUR on TikTok and so on.

    Geoff Lindsey is on the “it’s real” side; he has a YouTube video about it. Reddit is full of “it’s bogan.”

  21. prase says
    October 18, 2023 at 4:29 am

    One is used to the idea that speakers can’t hear subphonemic differences in their own speech, but it hadn’t occurred to me that also means that they hear other dialects of their language as if the phonemes were distributed in the same way as in their own speech; on reflection, that’s not really surprising.

    I did not notice that Polish rz and ż have merged even after quite a lot interaction with Poles, until I read about that on Wikipedia or somewhere. And even after that I tend to hear them as distinct in words that have cognates in Czech where the difference is still kept. (Also I remember being quite surprised by seeing a misspelling młodzierz on a grafitti somewhere in Cracow.)

  22. mollymooly says
    October 18, 2023 at 7:05 pm

    what are the odds (and this is a genuine question not a rhetorical one) that Scottishness or Welshness or Irishness will be sufficiently well-rooted as identities/cultures to successfully resist assimilation to the non-rhotic practices of the Sassenach?

    The popular complaints in the Republic of Ireland are that regional accents are disappearing in favour of Dublin (middle-class levelling) and that young people are sounding more American. John Kilraine is an RTÉ reporter with a semirhotic Dublin accent, as in this clip, but it’s more demotic that the prestige accent that attracts “culchies with notions”.

  23. Rodger C says
    October 19, 2023 at 1:12 pm

    young people are sounding more American

    That’s certainly the impression this American gets from watching Harry Wild.

  24. David Marjanović says
    October 26, 2023 at 4:55 pm

    I’m very surprised that parts of Greater London were still reported as 95–100% rhotic in 1950.

    Anyway, I got to hear a non-rhotic East Texan* last week – though I’m still wondering if that’s somehow connected to the fact that she merges the remaining /r/ with /w/ and sometimes /l/ as a not very well audible [ʋ]…

    * Said “East Texas” when asked where she was from. In other words, East Texas is the Texas of Texas.

    “Free” for “three” in Glasgow has been a thing for a while.

    Also in London. Must be the well-known Proto-Italic substratum.

    If people pronounce “lava” and “larva” equally, would they say they are non-rhotic whether they truly are, or whether they put excrescent r’s everywhere? In other words, can people distinguish the fact of the merger from its phonetic realization?

    That’s probably easier than noticing that there’s a complete merger! Also, I’ve never heard of hypercorrect r in Britain; there are parts of the northeastern US where “warsh” is stereotypical, but I bet it’s limited to certain words or perhaps certain vowels (PALM, THOUGHT?).

    in younger people around Bristol, rhoticity is now an urban characteristic

    Does not compute.

    If we accept that e.g. “West-Country-ness” has proven not to be a strong enough identity/culture to preserve rhoticism against the tides of standardization, what are the odds (and this is a genuine question not a rhetorical one) that Scottishness or Welshness or Irishness will be sufficiently well-rooted as identities/cultures to successfully resist assimilation to the non-rhotic practices of the Sassenach?

    It seems quite haphazard to me which sound changes spread as fashions and which are resisted as foreign. Flanders refuses to import [ʀ], so does German-speaking Switzerland (except the patricians’ sociolect of Berne if it still exists), and so, to a lesser extent, does Bavaria; the Netherlands have taken it up, and so has most but not all of Austria – and while Vienna did it in living memory, there are still places where little children don’t use it. I have no idea where German non-rhoticity comes from, but it doesn’t seem to be moving at all: all of Switzerland is fully rhotic; all of the Netherlands is fully rhotic, to the extent that my colleague from the southern tip of the Netherlands, where the local dialect is Central rather than Low Franconian, hadn’t noticed German non-rhoticity and had trouble believing it; in Vorarlberg, some dialects are fully rhotic and some are fully non-rhotic; Tyrolean keeps /r/ after /ɛ/ and /o/ but not otherwise; north of Switzerland, something like the Rhine valley keeps /r/ after short vowels but not after long ones; the rest of the area is fully non-rhotic, though with less linking r than in Britain and only a few lexicalized cases of intrusive r in some dialects.

  25. David Eddyshaw says
    October 26, 2023 at 5:08 pm

    I’ve never heard of hypercorrect r in Britain

    Apart from the so-called “intrusive r.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R

  26. Stu Clayton says
    October 26, 2023 at 5:36 pm

    East Texas is the Texas of Texas.

    As is every other part of Texas. Texas is self-contained, self-sufficient and auto-erhotic. It can be projected 1:1 onto a proper subset of itself.

  27. Keith Ivey says
    October 26, 2023 at 5:40 pm

    there are parts of the northeastern US where “warsh” is stereotypical, but I bet it’s limited to certain words or perhaps certain vowels (PALM, THOUGHT?).

    Not just northeastern. As a child in southern Virginia I said “warsh” and “Warshington”. I think it was only those words that had an intrusive r. Those pronunciations had disappeared from my speech by high school (which was in a less rural area).

  28. ktschwarz says
    October 26, 2023 at 6:25 pm

    My grandmother continued to say “warsh” and “Warshington” even after living in Washington, DC for decades, though nobody else I knew did; this was explained to me as due to her childhood in Indiana.

    “Warsh” is associated with the midlands, and linked by some linguists with “needs washed”, although as far as I know my grandmother didn’t have that.

    In this 2004 story in the Washington Post, the journalist consults some linguists on “Warshington”, and one reader claims it’s a “holdover” from “Washington area natives — especially those of the white working class”; I didn’t know that, but then I grew up in the suburbs and didn’t know any working-class natives of the city.

  29. J.W. Brewer says
    October 26, 2023 at 7:07 pm

    I don’t recall that “warsh” for “wash” was super-common among my northeasternish (northern Delaware, late Seventies) adolescent peers, but it was common enough that it was on the short list of Officially Wrong Low-Class Pronunciations that my prescriptivist 8th-grade English teacher went out of her way to heavy-handedly stigmatize, right along with pronouncing “route” like “rout” rather than “root” and (this is admittedly more of a Delaware Valley regionalism) pronouncing “water” as “wooder.”

  30. Y says
    October 26, 2023 at 7:09 pm

    People from the state of Warshington say Warshington.

  31. mollymooly says
    October 26, 2023 at 7:35 pm

    In Ireland, Chicargo and sarcrament are very farmiliar to me.

  32. John Cowan says
    October 27, 2023 at 12:58 am

    have no idea where German non-rhoticity comes from, but it doesn’t seem to be moving at all

    Apparently it is too old: see “Verschissmuss”. I am reminded of Norman Spinrad’s spelling faschochauvinism in his novel A World Between.

    See the extensive discussion of rhoticity and related matters at John Wells’s blogpost “ən ɪnˈɔrgjərəl ˈlɛktʃər?”. Note that that’s a question mark, not a glottal stop.

  33. David Marjanović says
    October 28, 2023 at 2:03 pm

    Apart from the so-called “intrusive r.”

    I should have written “hypercorrect preconsonantal r”. But that’s wrong too, as John Wells’s blog post and the comments demonstrate – though some of the examples are actually etymological nativization.

    Apparently it is too old:

    Oh, it can’t be that old; the source quoted there only tries to explain how wo & da lost their /r/ without any trace (while keeping it in composition: worin, darin, worauf, darauf…). I think the explanation fails, BTW; loss without a trace didn’t happen to either Tor word. Non-rhoticity, where postvocalic /r/ comes to be preceded by [ɐ̯] and then disappears when a consonant follows, must be much younger. In Upper Austria at any rate, I’m sure it can’t possibly date before the late 18th century.

  34. Y says
    October 28, 2023 at 6:39 pm

    Wo lost its /r/ for the same reason wer retained its: to confuse English speakers learning German.

    (P.S. This may be the first time I have ever used the genitive pronoun its.)

  35. PlasticPaddy says
    October 29, 2023 at 5:20 am

    @dm
    Is there a simple explanation why the “where” vowel is different from the “there” vowel in standard German and the Scandinavian languages but not elsewhere in Germanic? Even Bavarian has wo and do.

  36. David Marjanović says
    October 29, 2023 at 4:01 pm

    Oh no, Bavarian has /ʋo/ and /dɒ/.

    That actually compounds the mystery, because Bavarian /o/ ought to come either from earlier short /o/ or, if certain consonants or the end of the word follow, from */au/ (OHG, MHG /ɔː/). Clearly the latter is not what happened, and the former falls flat as well because Northwest Germanic */o/ comes from Proto-Germanic */a…u/ or */a…ɔː/, which were never present in this word either. Perhaps one of those mysterious roundings associated with labial consonants, e.g. OHG mâno > modern Mond “moon”.

    …and while I’m at it, I have no idea what the e is doing in the English words.

  37. John Cowan says
    October 29, 2023 at 11:50 pm

    PGmc hwar = hwa + -r ‘locative > PWGmc hwār (by analogy with hēr ‘here’), then backed to OHG wor > wo and fronted to OE hwǣr. Simple.

  38. David Marjanović says
    October 30, 2023 at 3:40 pm

    The length of the vowel is more likely regular.

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