Researchers fear the British spoken 'r' is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticity (phys.org)

submitted 11 months ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk

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Traditionally, parts of Lancashire have very clearly articulated "r"s, similar to the stereotype of Cornwall and the West Country. The pronunciation of these "r"s towards the ends of words is called rhoticity.

In fact, historically, hundreds of years ago, people throughout England used to pronounce strong "r"s. But now, says the research paper, these strong "r"s are definitely dying out.

In Blackburn, young speakers do mostly say their "r"s, but they are, according to the research team, phonetically very weak and often difficult to perceive. And they pronounce them less frequently than older speakers.

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[-] TheMongoose@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago

Huh. Interesting.

"Speakers from places like Blackburn usually differentiate between pairs of words such as 'stellar' and 'stella', whereas most of England would consider them to be the same," says Dr. Turton.

Short of deliberately rolling the R, I don't actually know how I could pronounce it... I'd never thought about that before.

[-] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's like ½ rolling your R.

Imagine how The Wurzels would say it, "stell-arr!".

this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023

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