Southeastern phonology: consonants R

/r/ is generally realized in Southeastern accents as an alveolar or post-alveolar approximant, . Southeastern accents are non-rhotic, but /r/ is pronounced in postvocalic position if the following word begins with a vowel (so-called linking /r/, thus  car alarm, but  car park). Intrusive /r/ is used in sequences in which an epenthetic /r/ is inserted in contexts which do not historically contain /r/: either, like linking /r/, across word-boundaries (as in pizza  and pasta), or word-internally. The latter habit is stigmatized to some degree, especially where it occurs in word-internal positions. Post-vocalic rhoticity appears to have vanished altogether from the relic area (Reading and Berkshire) mentioned by Wells (1982: 341), and appears to be advancing westward at a fairly rapid pace. In terms of the phonetic quality of /r/ in pre-vocalic positions, there is plentiful evidence of a dramatic rise in the frequency of the labiodental approximant  in southern England, and indeed also in parts of the North. This feature, formerly regarded as an affectation, a speech defect, or an infantilism, is now heard very frequently in the accents of a wide range of English cities, and appears generally to be more favored by young working-class speakers than by middle-class ones. Kerswill (1996: 189) suggests that the increased usage of  (and [f, v] for /θ , ð​/) among younger speakers represents a failure to eradicate immature pronunciations as a result of an attrition of the stigma attached to these forms.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Spelling and Pronunciation SUMMARY

American English vs. British English

Morphological Basis of English Spelling

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Vowels

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Consonants

Spelling and Pronunciation Irregularity of English Spelling

Structural Factors in Second Language Phonology SUMMARY

Perception

Optimality Theory (OT)

Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM)

Markedness

Hypercontrast