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In phonology and sociolinguistics, the term rhoticity refers broadly to the sounds
of the "r" family. Especially, linguists commonly make distinctions
between rhotic and non-rhotic dialects or accents.
Rhotic speakers pronounce the /r/ in words like large and park, while non-rhotic
speakers generally don't pronounce the /r/ in these words. Non-rhotic is also
known as "r"-dropping.
Linguist William Barras notes that "levels of rhoticity can vary between speakers
in a community, and the process of a loss of rhoticity is a gradual one, rather than
the sharp binary distinction implied by the labels rhotic and non-rhotic"
("Lancashire" in Researching Northern English, 2015).
"Consider dialects that 'drop r' such as varieties of English spoken in the United
Kingdom, the southern United States, and New England. Speakers of these 'r-Iess'
dialects don't drop r just anywhere, they do so only under certain phonological
conditions.
For example, speakers drop r in a word when it follows a vowel, and would
therefore not pronounce the r in the following words:
Speakers say 'pahk the car in Hahvad Yahd.' (A similar rules accounts for so-
called r-intrusion, where some speakers add r to words that end in vowels before
another word that begins with a vowel, as in . . . That idear is a good one.)"
"While the dropping of 'r' had spread [from London and East Anglia] to most other
accents of England by the eighteenth century, rhoticity remains a feature of
accents spoken in the geographically more extreme areas of England today: the
southwest, northwest, and northeast.
This distribution suggests that the loss of this feature has been spreading outwards
from the eastern dialects since the fifteenth century, but has not yet affected these
few remaining strongholds. From this development, we might predict that
postvocalic 'r' will at some stage be entirely lost from accents of English, though
it is impossible to determine exactly when this process will reach completion."
Linguistic innovations cause the difference between urban and rural accents. This
is due to the general economic, demographic and cultural dominance of town over
country, and to the structure of the communieation network. An innovation
starting in London is quite likely to reach Bristol before it reaches rural Wiltshire,
although the latter is nearer. A Chicago-based innovation is likely to get to
Rockford, Illinois, earlier than to some smaller town in between. The speech of
Manchester, too, is in many ways more like that of London than the traditional
rural dialect of a village in nearby Cheshire: London Manchester Hyde, Cheshire
'brush' [brA.s] · [brus] [br<iiS]
'such' [SAC] [sue] [sic]
'tough' [W] [tuf] [tnf]
'put' [put] [put] [pur]
The Manchester and London forms are not identical, but there is a regular
relationship such that all London [A] and [u] vowels correspond to Manchester [u]
vowels. In the case of the Hyde forms there is no such regular correspondence.
Speakers of rural accents have been said to speak more slowly than speakers of
urban accents. However, there would appear to have been no previous empirical
investigation of such a claim. The urban (Edinburgh) speakers usually speak faster
than the rural (Orkney) speakers. The claim that rural speakers speak more slowly
than urban speakers therefore still awaits empirical support. Some discussion is
offered concerning the possible relationships among speech tempo, lifestyle and
accent.
3. THE ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION [U] BEING REPLACED BY A NEW
PRO:IMNCIATION [A]:
For example, there is the difference between London [A] and Manchester [u].
This innovation has since spread northwards and westwards, but has travelled so
slowly that it has not yet reached Manchester or other areas of northern England.
Notice, though, that southerners and RP speakers nevertheless have an [U]-sound
in items such as put and full, good and cushion. The historical development
behind this is that the short u vowel inherited from Middle English underwent a
split, perhaps 300 years or so ago. The mechanism of this split is not, I think,
thoroughly understood; but the upshot was that in most kinds of modern
English full does not rhyme with dull, nor put with cut. In my book Accents of
English (Wells 1982) I called this split the FOOT-STRUT split, since FOOT and
STRUT respectively were the keywords I used for the lexical sets affected. In
terms of the phonemic system, English acquired an extra vowel contrast, leaving
it with six stressable short vowels in place of the earlier five.
Attitudes are different again when we take another characteristic feature of
northern pronunciation, namely the use of a short vowel in words such as bath,
staff, glass and answer. This reflects yet another instance of northerners standing
out against a sound change that took root in the south of England and in RP¸ the
change I call BATH Broadening. For a thousand years or more in the history of
English bath and so on had had a short vowel, just as in words like cat and trap.
But by three hundred years or so ago London people were lengthening this vowel
in the position before [f, T, s], voiceless fricatives. So bath went from [baT] to
[ba:T]. In due course further changes meant that the long and short vowel qualities
came to diverge rather noticeably, so that we now get [bA:T] with a very different
vowel-sound from cat [kæt].
Some words resisted this change. And new words with the short vowel came into
the language. As a result, broad-BATH speakers now have non-rhyming pairs such
as gl[A:]ss but g[æ]s, c[A:]stle but t[æ]ssel, bath but maths, pass but mass,
disaster but aster, answer but cancer. And they still haven't altogether made up
their minds about plastic, graph, and substantial.
4. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MANY DIALECTS
The increased geographical mobility during the course of the twentieth century led
to the disappearance of many dialects and dialect forms through a process we can
call dialect levelling - the levelling out of differences between one dialect and
another .This process of dialect levelling is a very interesting one for sociolinguists
because today it seems to be playing a very important role in ongoing linguistic
developments in many countries. The situation in England is, however, rather
more complex than that. What seems to be happening is that Traditional Dialects
like those of Hyde are disappearing, but the larger modern dialect areas which do
remain, and continuing to diverge from one another.
The element of mutual contact plays a large role in the maintenance of speech
patterns; that is why differences between geographically distant dialects are
normally greater than those between dialects of neighbouring settlements. This
also explains why bundles of isoglosses so often form along major natural
barriers—impassable mountain ranges, deserts, uninhabited marshes or forests, or
wide rivers—or along political borders. Similarly, racial or religious differences
contribute to linguistic differentiation because contact between members of one
faith or race and those of another within the same area is very often much more
superficial and less frequent than contact between members of the same racial or
religious group. An especially powerful influence is the relatively infrequent
occurrence of intermarriages, thus preventing dialectal mixture at the point where
it is most effective—namely, in the mother tongue learned by the child at home.
9. OTHER LANGUAGE GROUPS ADOPT WORDS PERTAINING TO THE
FIELD OF PARTICULAR LANGUAGE:
At present, English is a source of loan words for very many languages, particularly
in Europe. Borrowings of this type happen initially through the medium of the
bilingual individual, and individuals bilingual in English along with their native
language are becoming increasingly common as the result of the widespread use
of English as a lingua franca and it correspondingly widespread teaching in
schools. It is due not to any inherent superiority of the English language as a
medium of international communication, but rather to the former world political,
economic, educational and scientific dominance of Britain and the similar present
dominance of the USA.
English is definitely lacking when it comes to defining. In this infographic we have
10 non-existent English words along with their translation in another language.
Even though there may be words in English that can describe the things listed
below, there are no direct translations.
For instance, what is a word that means “to look worse after a haircut?” Sure you
can say that the person looks bad, horrible or even terrible, but in Japanese they’d
be defined by the word “age-tori.”
How about “singing and crying at the same time?” In English, you would use that
exact expression or maybe call the person emotional, but in French the person
would be defined using the word “chantepleurer.”
Other examples:
Pana po’o
Scratching your head in order to have you to remember something you have
forgotten. (Haiwaiin)
Kabelsalat
The word for a tangled mess of cables can be translated as “Cable-salad”.
(German)
Gurfa
The amount of water you can scoop up with just one hand. (Arabic)
Gulseong-gulseong
Eyes filled with tears, with are about to fall but have not yet run out of the
eyes. (Korean)
Badkruka
This word is used to talk about someone who is reluctant to get into the
water when swimming outside. (Swedish)