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Researchers fear the British spoken 'r' is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticity

phys.org

Researchers fear the spoken 'r' is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticity in England
10 comments

  • Sensationalist headline-writer: "These researchers are neutrally investigating language change? Let's throw 'fear' in there to get up the prescriptivists' hackles!"

  • Yeah I'm from the north of Australia and our bogan arse accent drops the r on the end of words too.

    No one says carrr It's more like cah

    • As far as extant English accents go, non-rhoticity is basically the default at this point. Most Americans and Canadians are rhotic, as are Irish and Scottish. Then a tiny number of English accents. That's about it.

  • cross-posted from the sh.itjust.works community from over a year ago, just because I was looking at the most appropriate linguistics community to share stuff with and noticed I shared this there, although this is a much more active community.

  • I made this map a year or so ago, by superimposing two maps from Wikipedia. (If anyone wants I can dig the source maps.) Lancashire is that red "bubble" up north. Rhoticity is dying in the UK, and specially in England.

    And while the feature alone is not a big deal, since it's preserved elsewhere, it's a sign that local varieties are dying - and those are pretty unique. They're likely being replaced with Southern Standard British, by a death of a thousand cuts.

    This also shows that claims that "American English" is killing the local dialects are likely false, otherwise you'd see an increase of rhoticity there. The local dialects are dying but due to country-internal pressures, such as identity; not due to simple media exposure. (This is, sadly, a rather typical pattern)

  • Wow, one thing Blackburn is notable for, I guess.

10 comments