Word of the day – rhotic

I found a new word today, a word I don’t think I have ever come across before, rhotic. It means the sound in English spoken by Americans or those from the south-west of England who pronounce the ‘r’ in words such as ‘hard’ and ‘far’… other English accents make an ‘aa’ sound. It’s quite a new word, it only arrived in the 1960’s and I don’t suppose it is one much used… although I did come across it on Facebook! In a conversation about the radio soap-opera ‘The Archers’, someone mentioned the way a character, Eddie speaks. (Mummerset is a pretend country area of England with a south-west accent)

• B: Eddie often does this. He inserts Mummerset “r”s when none exists in the spelling. Someone who actually does have a rhotacising accent – ie sounds an [r] in a word like “Torrbay” as opposed to Tawbay for other English speakers – would never sound an [r] in the second syllable of Yarmouth, but they certainly would sound the [r] at the end of the first – so [yarmuth].
• L: and of course, as a Scot, I know all about rolling my Rs  
• J: Why are rhotic accents sexy? Because they arrrrrr!
• C:  I have spent a good deal of my life in areas with rhotacising accents (my new word of the day!), originally in Bristol, now in Devon. No one rhotacises quite like a Bristolian ( – from south Bristol.. a north Bristol accent is different). I have never encountered anyone saying “Yarrmirth”, so I concur completely with B.A.