How do you pronounce your "r"s towards the ends of words like Shearer, purr, nerd and pore? And what about those in car, bird and her?

Traditionally, parts of Lancashire have very clearly articulated "r"s, similar to the stereotype of Cornwall and the West Country. The pronunciation of these "r"s towards the ends of words is called rhoticity.

In fact, historically, hundreds of years ago, people throughout England used to pronounce strong "r"s. But now, says the research paper, these strong "r"s are definitely dying out.

In Blackburn, young speakers do mostly say their "r"s, but they are, according to the research team, phonetically very weak and often difficult to perceive. And they pronounce them less frequently than older speakers.

  • TheMongoose
    3•1 year ago

    Huh. Interesting.

    “Speakers from places like Blackburn usually differentiate between pairs of words such as ‘stellar’ and ‘stella’, whereas most of England would consider them to be the same,” says Dr. Turton.

    Short of deliberately rolling the R, I don’t actually know how I could pronounce it… I’d never thought about that before.