Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 December 20

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December 20

Non-rhotic words in rhotic accents (or not)

When I was in Japan for the first time, 20-odd years ago, there was a guy from Seattle there (who still owes me £35 he borrowed from me for a trip to a love hotel with some Australian girl), and he said to me that in some American dialects, the 'r' is pronounced, even if it did not exist in the first place, such as "The idear is..." and so on, which is exactly what we do in the UK. Can anyone pinpoint the accent he was talking about? KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 04:30, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

See "linking r" (the source of all the British jokes about "Laura Norder")... AnonMoos (talk) 04:41, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Except that it doesn't really say which accents do this. --65.94.50.4 (talk) 09:14, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

I live in Mississippi and can confirm that people here stick 'r's on the end of words that end in vowel sounds. They also exaggerate the 'r' sound on the end of words that already have one. Idear, holler(hollow), wheelbarr(wheelbarrow), to list some examples. Generally only people with heavy southern accents do this, and I hear it more from older people than the younger generations.146.235.130.59 (talk) 13:27, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

The mention of "hollow" pronounced "holler" reminds me of Chuck Yeager's autobiography. Writing about his youth in rural West Virginia, he says things like "small families planted in the hollers of the Appalachians" and leaves it to the reader to understand that "holler" is the same word we spell "hollow". (Or maybe he explains it later, I forget.) So this suggests that Appalachian dialects also use the intrusive R. --65.94.50.4 (talk) 19:28, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Previous ref-desk thread here. Deor (talk) 14:12, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

We Midwesterners used to make fun of JFK, with his "Ha-vuhd" accent, pronouncing Castro's nation "Cuber". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:53, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

It's mostly or even only in nonrhotic New England accents that you hear this. I'm not sure if the nonrhotic New York accent has intrusive R, but I am pretty sure that nonrhotic Southern accents don't (they don't even have linking r, so even the letter is has no r-sound). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:06, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Regarding the "law and order" thing, as I recall guys like George Wallace pronounced it "lawn awduh". No "r" to be found. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:18, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

It's extremely common in the UK, so much so that in many cases where we drop the 't' (usually replaced with a glottal stop), that glottal stop becomes an 'r' before a following vowel. So, "That'll do" becomes (in my dialect of Liverpool) "Darrel do" (with a trilled or flapped 'r'). I find it fascinating in non-rhotic dialects to see that we add an 'r' when there isn't one, yet don't say them when there are (unless there is a vowel following, like in 'there are'). This is why I was wondering about whether rhoticists would add them in as well. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 15:29, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Harkens back to the early recordings of those four Liverpudlian lads called "The Beatles". Their cover of this song: "There were birds in the sky, but I never SAWR them winging, till there was you..." And this part of "I Should Have Known Better": "Give me moe, hey-hey-hey, give me mooooe..." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Aye, but their accents are 1950s/1960s accents, where it was more Lancastrian than it is now. Bizarrely, as time has gone on since our immigration to England from Ireland, the accent has become more and more Irish-sounding (with elements of Scots), at least in our vowels and most consonants, but still not rhotic. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 15:53, 20 December 2014 (UTC)