Concept
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant /r/ by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieties, the historical English /r/ sound is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the /r/ sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the /r/ in that position (the linking R) since it is followed by a vowel in this case. The rhotic varieties of English include the dialects of South West England, Scotland, Ireland, and most of the United States and Canada. The non-rhotic varieties include most of the dialects of modern England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In some varieties, such as those of some parts of the Southern and Northeastern United States, rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic r is deleted depending on an array of social factors, such as being more correlated today with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, certain ethnic identities, and less formal speaking contexts. Evidence from written documents suggests that loss of postvocalic /r/ began sporadically in England during the mid-15th century, but those /r/-less spellings were uncommon and were restricted to private documents, especially those written by women. In the mid-18th century, postvocalic /r/ was still pronounced in most environments, but by the 1740s to the 1770s, it was often deleted entirely, especially after low vowels. By the early 19th century, the southern British standard was fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety, but some variation persisted as late as the 1870s.