Rhotic and Non-rhotic Accents - Distribution

Distribution

Examples of rhotic accents are: Scottish English, Mid Ulster English, Canadian English and most varieties of American English and Irish English. Non-rhotic accents include most accents of England, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa.

Most speakers of most of North American English are rhotic, as are speakers from Barbados, Scotland and most of Ireland.

In England, rhotic accents are found in the West Country (south and west of a line from near Shrewsbury to around Portsmouth), the Corby area, most of Lancashire (north and west of the centre of Manchester), some parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and in the areas that border Scotland. The prestige form, however, exerts a steady pressure towards non-rhoticity. Thus the urban speech of Bristol or Southampton is more accurately described as variably rhotic, the degree of rhoticity being reduced as one moves up the class and formality scales.

Most speakers of Indian English, and Pakistani English, have a rhotic accent. Other areas with rhotic accents include Otago and Southland in the far south of New Zealand's South Island, where a Scottish influence is apparent.

Areas with non-rhotic accents include Australia, most of the Caribbean, most of England (including Received Pronunciation speakers), most of New Zealand, Wales, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Canada is entirely rhotic except for small isolated areas in southwestern New Brunswick, parts of Newfoundland, and Lunenburg and Shelburne Counties, Nova Scotia.

In the United States, much of the South was once non-rhotic, but in recent decades non-rhotic speech has declined. Today, non-rhoticity in Southern American English is found primarily among older speakers, and only in some areas such as central and southern Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, and Norfolk, Virginia, as well as in the y'at accent of New Orleans. Parts of New England, especially Boston, are non-rhotic, as are New York City and surrounding areas. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is largely non-rhotic.

In some non-rhotic Southern American and AAVE accents, there is no linking r, that is, /r/ at the end of a word is deleted even when the following word starts with a vowel, so that "Mister Adams" is pronounced . In a few such accents, intervocalic /r/ is deleted before an unstressed syllable even within a word when the following syllable begins with a vowel. In such accents, pronunciations like for Carolina, or for "bear up" are heard. This pronunciation also occurs in AAVE.

The English spoken in Asia, India, and the Philippines is predominantly rhotic. In the case of the Philippines, this may be explained because the English that is spoken there is heavily influenced by the American dialect. In addition, many East Asians (in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) who have a good command of English generally have rhotic accents because of the influence of American English. This excludes Hong Kong, whose RP English dialect is a result of its almost 150-year-history as a British Crown colony (later British dependent territory).

Other Asian regions with non-rhotic English are Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Spoken English in Myanmar is non-rhotic, but there are a number of English speakers with a rhotic or partially rhotic pronunciation.