Language Log discusses British attempts at American accents.
In the comments, a number of people (who I assume are British speakers of non-rhotic dialects) discuss how you know where to pronounce the rhotic R in American dialects. It takes several comments before they establish that you pronounce the R where a letter R is written. Then they briefly hypothesize on WHY American dialects would do such a thing.
That completely blew my mind! I'm familiar with the concept of non-rhotic R and I've been exposed to a reasonable variety of British accents, but I never consciously realized that their pronunciation of R does not directly correlate with the presence of a written R! In my dialect, R is one of the few reliable letters that is always and consistently pronounced as written. (Unless, of course, you can think of some exceptions that I'm blind to, although R is one of the phonemes I had speech therapy for so I am more aware of it than I am of the average phoneme.)
4 comments:
I'm not sure what you mean, but is the stereotypical Boston accent an example of this?
park = pahk
Harvard = hahvahd
but
Tina = Teener
Linda = Linder
Boston is the one (or one of the few) exceptions in North America. In most North American dialects we pronounce the R as "arrrrr", wherever we see the letter R written (i.e. rhotic R). In most British dialects, they don't always pronounce it so much, just saying sort of "ahhh" instead (non-rhotic). So because their R's are scarcely pronounced at all, they seem to psychologically have R's in random places (you can kind of hear it when they attempt to do US accents here.
I guess someone who understood language better could hear it. I can't.
I did hear "idear", but lots of USians actually say that. A former supervisor of mine, born and raised in New Jersey, used to say, "I have an idear. Let's get Brender to do it." Brenda didn't appreciate it.
New Jersey? Weird. That doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm not up on my smaller US dialects. I wonder if they perceive the letter R as being pronounced where it's written (like it is in American Standard and probably like how they learned to read) or if they perceive hidden R's like the UKians do?
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