Rhotic

Rhotic speech is common in Ireland, Scotland, much of the United States, Canada, West Country England, and many parts of the north and west of England.

2009, Ingrid Rosenfelder, Rhoticity in educated Jamaican English, Thomas Hoffmann, Licia Siebers, World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects: Selected Papers from the 13th IAWE Conference, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Contrary to “traditional” descriptions in the literature, Jamaican English cannot be characterized as predominantly rhotic, exhibiting an overall degree of rhoticity of approximately 20 per cent.

Rhotic (or r-ful) dialects are linguistic relics in England, as shown in Map 7-5. Nonrhotic or r-less dialects have been displacing them since the seventeenth century. Among the linguistically most conservative population in England, represented by the NORMs of the SED, both rhotic and nonrhotic dialects are found throughout the country. The fact that the rhotic dialects are relics is indicated on Map 7-5 not by the predominance of nonrhotic dialects, but by the discontinuity of the regions where rhotic dialects are found. A century or so earlier, they covered even more of the country, and the three regions probably formed part of a continuous network.

Except for the Southland area, New Zealand English today is non-rhotic (Wells, 1982: 606). Australian, Tristanian and Port Stanley Falkland Islands English are also non-rhotic, as is South African English (except for some people who are native Afrikaans speakers – Wells 1982: 617). This has often been erroneously ascribed (for instance, in Trudgill, 1986a) to the fact that most of England was non-rhotic at the time of the main immigration to New Zealand. It is now obvious that this is not correct at all: of the eighty-four Mobile Unit speakers analysed, an astonishing 92% are rhotic to some degree.

Near-synonym: retroflex

In the IPA, a rhotic vowel (aka R-coloured vowel, retroflex vowel, vocalic r or rhotacised vowel) is indicated by the affixing of a hook diacritic ( ˞ ) to the right of the regular symbol for the vowel. The rhotic consonants are /r/, /ɾ/, /ɹ/, /ɻ/, /ʀ/, /ʁ/, /ɽ/ and /ɺ/.

What is normally understood by the term "trill" is a rhotic consonant of the type seen in the Spanish word perro 'dog', or the usual pronunciation of the phoneme /r/ in Parisian French.

The rhotic tokens were analyzed as /r/-ful on both occasions. In addition, the researcher conducting the acoustic analysis of F₃ also held the impression that all analyzed tokens were rhotic. Some tokens were highly constricted and others were more weakly rhotic.