Rhoticity, and Why You Don’t Need to Care

The Greek letter “rho“ was the ancestor of the Latin letter “R” and the treatment of the letter “R” in linguistics is the study of rhoticity. I don’t mean to say whether the letter is treated nicely or shabbily, but how it is pronounced.

Some languages are rhotic, that is, they pronounce the letter R in all instances, whereas others are non-rhotic, which means that R is not pronounced in certain circumstances, typically the terminal R. English is a language which has some rhotic speakers, and some non-rhotic speakers. (English seems to be the preferred language for rule-breakers!)

But here’s what’s really bizarre: English used to be a fully rhotic language, which means that all English speakers once fully pronounced the letter R in all situations. Shakespeare was definitely rhotic, and he would have called himself “Shakespeeeerrrrr”, not “Shakespeeah”. But the English of England is now non-rhotic, whereas the English of some of “the colonies” is rhotic, while that of other “colonies” is not. A Canadian drives a carrrrr while her English cousin or New Zealand friend will drive a cahhhh.

How confusing is that, and how did that come to be?

Well, nobody is entirely sure, but the best theory is that amongst influential English speakers in and around London in the 1700s, it became fashionable to be non-rhotic, possibly because of the influence of French and German (remember, the first King Georges were German and really didn’t bother to learn much English).

As went the language of the court and the aristocracy, so gradually went the language of the rest of the country, spreading out little by little across England, the prestige accent being chosen as “better”. Even into the late 1800s, though, many of England’s rural areas were still rhotic, but today if there any rhotic local accents left in England, they are at the extreme fringes. Scotland retains a distinct burr and Ireland tends to be mostly rhotic. The Welsh are rhotic when speaking their own tongue, but non-rhotic or slightly rhotic when speaking English.

But the “colonies” were different. Those colonies settled before and during the rhotic shift were populated by rhotic speakers, but those settled after the rhotic shift were populated by non-rhotic speakers. Thus the United States and Canada are, by and large, rhotic speakers, but later-settled colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, for instance, are non-rhotic. (The story of English acquisition in India is a whole other study, reserved for later.)

Interestingly enough, even after initial colonization of the older colonies, some elites still looked to the mother country for cultural cues, as a result of which some areas of the older colonies, such as the Deep South and New England, cultivated the non-rhotic speech of “proper English”, after which elite speech spread to the common folk. Thus Southern US and New England dialects tend to be non-rhotic.

Settlement by a disproportionate number of Scots and Irish also tended to emphasize rhoticity in the colonies. To this day, for instance, in Cape Breton one can still hear a slightly raspy Scottish “R”.

But language is never static, and even today amongst English speakers, rhoticity is fluid and changing. Some scholars are hearing emerging rhoticity amongst young speakers in Australia while popular music and Black English tends to drive a non-rhotic trend in the US.

So, does it matter? Not really. Languages change, morph, evolve… The real issue is intelligibility here and now, and frankly rhotic and non-rhotic speech are mutually intelligible. But no matter which way this all shakes out, it’s great fun to watch language morph and change before our very eyes. Or ears. Or eahs.