I'm a Mandarin speaker. I found an interesting feature of the English "r" sound a couple of years after I started learning English. Both Mandarin and major English dialects have a similar pronunciation of "r". However, the English "r" seems to always come with a rounded-lip feature, or pronounce like "wr", but textbooks and dictionaries of English never show the /w/ sound in the IPA of words, and some even tell us the letter "w" in the combination "wr" is silent. Being a beginner, I stuck to IPA very much, believing it represented the real pronunciation, until I incidentally got to compare the pronunciation of Mandarin "rou" (meaning "meat") and English "roe" (or "row"). I found that my lips didn't have much movement for "rou" but had an expanding movement for "roe". Then I suddenly realized why some American-born Chinese singers sounded so unnatural when they said Mandarin words beginning with "r". They just simply took the English way of pronouncing it. They said "rou", "ren" (meaning "human"), and "ranhou" (meaning "then") like "rwou", "rwen", and "rwanhou". So the truth is, it's not that the "w" preceding "r" is silent, but all "r"s except those following "w" omit the letter "w" that represents a lip-rounding feature. The English "roe" is actually the Mandarin word "rou" superposed with the English word "woe" if ignoring the slight difference between Mandarin's /ɻ/ and English's /ɹ/ and between the vowels. I know there was probably a sharp distinction between "r" and "wr" when "r" was still a flap or a thrill, but today it's apparently "r" that gets assimilated to "wr" rather than the opposite. I hope teachers and textbooks of English can stop telling English learners that the "w" in "wr" is silent but instead that the English "r" has an invisible lip-rounding feature, if they would like their students to have a pronunciation that sounds natural to native English speakers.
The Mandarin "r" is also quite idiosyncratic in that in more Northern areas, it's often pronounced much more akin to the French soft "j" as in "Jacques".
I love how people are comparing the pronunciations with that of their native languages!! I find it amazing to see not just the differences but also very much the similarities in languages that are otherwise so very different.. Thank you for sharing 😊❤️
Fun fact: this change from tap R to approximant alveolar R is happening right now in some brazilian portuguese dialects, specially when R is in coda position.
As I understand it, this is typical of the paulistano and caipira dialects, yes? Wouldn’t the r in coda position be more of a [h] or [x] rather than a tap in most dialects?
Simon Roper is our Linguist Hobbit, a true treasure. Even the rural environment is top notch. Keep them coming. Congratulations for the great job you are doing. Cheers 👍💐🙏🌹
Knowing Frisian, it's always fun to see these evolutions, as many of the things you state here for Old English still are true for modern Frisian (outside of the cities that were more heavily influenced by Dutch). Also the northeastern part of Frisia has had an influx of Prussian workers 150 years ago, so there they are somewhere in between Germanic and Frisian for pronunciation of some words, which make the nuances in sounds even more recognisable (including the R).
HEY! Another Friesian!! Hoi!! Yeah, all that is true.. There also seems to be a Danish influence in Friesian as well though.. A lot of regular Dutch folks won't understand much from people living in the provinces roughly above the Rhine when they speak the local languages (Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe).. Some of that goes back to the Romans.. the Rhine was one of the borders of the Roman Empire for a long time.. 😊❤️
Fun fact: some northeastern American accents include the linking "r" and even add it to the ends of words when there isn't even a link. For example "vaniller ice cream" and "idear" (for "idea").
Had a friend from poland, who would say "idear" Thought that this was something from Europe, but later on, heard lots of the academic types in NE say it like that.
@@Ma1nspr1ng Weirdly, if I do accidentally shove dark l's, but l's often switch into tapped r's. TR hasn't merged with CHR at all, SH gets shoved further in the mouth in certain positions. TCH/CH often. Drawling and drawing get confused due to that. Probably due to all vowels are getting deeper in the mouth, so vowel distinction is used more to compensate. T's often drop like flies. Hiatus can easily lose the t without much difference, knowing it was there to begin with.
This morning I was extremely down and under immense stress. The wonderfully relaxing sound of Simon Roper's voice brought me relief. There is something magical about his videos, metaphysical qualities, for certain. I love it and am a big fan. Apart from that I find a lot of his videos interesting as a Dutch student of real English.
Wales has this funny thing where we have southern-english style non-rhotic accents, scottish-style rhotic accents (particularly by Welsh speakers) and non-rhotic accents with a flapped pronunciation at the same time. In my experience, these are completely random in distribution, as I've heard all three just in my county, which is overwhelmingly English-Speaking, and I've heard all three up in a majority Welsh-speaking area in Gwynedd too
There are also southern-English style rhotic or marginally rhotic accents where I'm from near the border with England (i.e. with the approximant, either strong or subtle). So even more variety!
Rhotics are so fascinating, there's something so distinctive about them in most languages and yet looking at their cross-linguistic variability, one really struggles to identify one unifying feature. Thanks for the deep dive into this topic, and all the beautiful footage you interspersed it with.
I don't think so. Probably just transcription. The letters. Writing system has a huge influence. I'm not convinced the idea of 'phonemes' is all that distinct from the alphabet. A common 'rhotic' consonant, [ɾ], is also taken as /d/ for all the native Englishspeakers who produce it as an allophone of /t, d/ intervocalically (which is most of them). /d/ is the phoneme and letter they would hear and write it as.
@@skyworm8006 "I'm not convinced the idea of 'phonemes' is all that distinct from the alphabet." What do you mean by this? The way you worded it I'd disagree heavily, but I could have misunderstood.
This is a bit exaggerated, as Brita Borg was from Stockholm, but in my part of Sweden (the northern part of the west coast) this pronunciation is natural to many people: th-cam.com/video/BG_hh_f9ANg/w-d-xo.html
😆 That's me with earbuds on, as I'm out picking up dog poo from the yard, probably to the bewilderment of my neighbors with their sliding door open at their balcony overlooking my yard.
I'm a choral singer in the US and very early on we're taught to avoid American rhotic R's when singing classical tradition English music. They sound incorrect for the tradition and cause difficulties with classical singing technique which tries to keep clean transitions between consonants and vowels
Same here. American choir singer, its funny because americans sound british when they sing in choirs, but most British artists who do solo songs choose to sound American
@@nostalgiatrip7331 the only times we were allowed American R's was for music in the American musical theater tradition - which certainly would have sounded weird sung without them!
In country music the singers like to put a lot of emphasis on that rhotic r, once you notice it it really stands out. Irish folk music also does it a lot, too. I've always wanted to hear a choir that sings a classic piece with full weight on the r, just cause.
@@jared_bowden love the Ray Charles example in the video too. Never noticed Georgians dropped Rs but now that I think of "Geo'gia on my mind," of course they do!
@@nostalgiatrip7331 Thats cool. I've noticed how much more relaxed American English sounds than British English. Its just great for singing in, as it gives a smoother flow. On the other hand, when listening to angsty, English Punk and New Wave recently, the harder consonants of British English increased the sense of jarring emotions that the song was expressing.
I feel like the fricatives are more common nowadays, especially on TV also. I also feel like the trilled R is usually a tongue tap R for younger people. I only ever hear a really hear a real rolling R when to speaking to very old people or foreigners.
@@Thomas.c4647 Nationalisme is een ideologie gebaseerd op de mythe van de natie-staat. Ze dient enkel om de kapitalistische status-quo te bestendigen door de arbeidersklasse langs arbitraire lijnen te verdelen. Of erger, ze is de basis voor reactionaire ideologiën die de maatschappelijke verhoudingen wil terugwerpen naar sterk hierarchische en feodale verhoudingen. Ze leid tot niets anders dan de exclusie en discriminatie van minderheden en inter-imperialistische conflicten. Enkel de elites gedijen bij nationalisme. En een ieder die denkt de "globalistische elites" te kunnen bestrijden middels nationalisme heeft zich laten bedonderen door de locale bourgeoisie en kleinburgerij. Kortom, alles is mis met nationalisme. Er rest ons dus niets dan de ideën van het nationalisme met vastberaden felheid te bestrijden als we een wereld willen creëren vrij van uitbuiting, discriminatie en onderdrukking.
@@VRSVLVS ik was hier niet gekomen voor een politieke discussie, maar nu je toch bezig bent... Het is niet vaak dat ik een communist tegenkom, zie je. Je spreekt van een globalistische elite in je betoog. Bestaat deze globalistische elite volgens jou en zo ja wat vind jij van deze ontwikkeling? Hierna stel ik voor dat wij verder gaan met onze gang van zaken.
A very interesting discussion about the sound of "r" in the multitudinous variants of English. I'm an American English speaker, born in New York City, raised in Philadelphia, with parents that came from Boston; so I grew up with these different accents. A Bostonian would never be mistaken for a New Yorker and the Philadelphia accent is different from both Boston and New York. There are those that claim a Long Island accent is different and distinguishable from that of Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, but I doubt it. I never could really make those distinctions. However, there is a kind of "r" and "a" and their combination in words like "barn" and "farm" from the "down East" regions of Maine and northern New Hampshire which to my ear is quite distinct from the Boston accents of my parents. This northern, rural New England accent (some would call it a "Yankee" accent) might be related to early variants of English from England, but I would like to know your thoughts about it.
I've read that the "throat R" arrived to Copenhagen ca 1780, and to Southern Norway ca 1800. One of my ancestors, born ca 1805 some 40 km into the land was the last person in that municipality sticking to the traditional "rolling R" [some people appear to manage to roll the "throat R", e.g., Edith Piaf in "No, je ne regret rien", and Roy Orbison in some of his "growls"]. Norway also has a "thick L" which kind of overlaps with R, e.g., the word "gård" is pronounced almost like "gå:L". ["gård" = farm, or (back) yard. I assume this word ("gård") is related to "gjerde" (= fence), and to guard, garden, yard, as well as to Slavic city names with the word "gorod"; the vikings referred to Constantinopel as "Miklagard", the big "city".]
Interesting to see how the Scottish dialect has preserved more of the pronounciation of old "Anglo-Saxon". Including the "thrilling R". In my youth (the '60s) in the Netherlands the thrilling R was considered the "proper pronounciation". Children that pronounced the R in a different way were sent to the logopedist. But we don't do that anymore nowadays ...
hello Simon, thank you again for your amazing work. I hope you are being supported in some way to free up your time to make these videos. What a thing to be so knowledgable and so generous with your knowledge. I find it so exciting you aren't just following the trail of so many other intellectuals, you are cutting your own groove and my god is it appreciated! Keep up the amazing work, best wishes, B
Simon, there's yet another pronunciation of "R", I think. I spent a couple of summers in Dublin and noticed that some speakers pronounced R as a retroflex tap [ɽ] before vowels. I'm pretty sure it's a retroflex tap, since I have that sound in my native dialect of Norwegian (where it's a realisation of L in some positions and Old Norse RÐ).
I would be fascinated if you could find some sort of example, maybe a recording, of what you're talking about. As an Irishman (albeit not from Dublin) I can't say that I have ever heard this realisation of the R phoneme to my knowledge, and I'm having trouble even imagining it. Though I would hesitate to tell you that your ears lied to you!
@@Tommat194 , it is also possible that he happened to hear a person with pronunciation defects or from another locality. No one is protected from a strange case after all.
I don't know what a retroflex tap is but do you mean for example in the word 'rabbit' the tongue is curled back on itself, combined with the jaw being pulled back towards the throat? If so, I know what ya mean, lad.
As someone with a rhotic dialect, I think intrusive R is a super interesting feature. Before having any education in linguistics, I found it pretty odd that in that Billy Joel song, he says "Brenda(r) and Eddie". It really stood out as an odd pronunciation to me. I love the in depth explanations from this channel for the little things we don't think about all that often.
@@AAA-fh5kd I've heard "warsh" for standard "wash" /ah/ from (mostly rural) American speakers. Adding the -R at the end of words with a vowel (tomater and tobacker) and things like "schoolmarm" with the R intruding, seem to be a form of hypercorrecting from older generations from pioneer-era speech, where people who were not so literate might read or write with that R added to try to mimic the R-dropping Northern / Eastern American speech (educated) or British speech (also seen as educated, except that those American pioneer settlers tended to keep the R in their own dialect, so they pronounced it or added it in between, even when it didn't belong, or when an AH or prolonged AA would be done (R-colored) in a British R.P. or American New Englander / Yankee pronunciation. -- However, that "linking" R (liaison) added between vowels between words, like "Brenda-R-and-Eric" seems to be a feature mostly for some New England accents (dialects), possibly more old-fashioned now. I've heard Norrtheasterners do it without knowing they do it, while Southerners and Southwesterneres hear it and think it's laughable and non-standard. (For example, a substitute teacher when I was in school got laughed at by half the class because she habitually added the R between words with vowels., and our part of the country doesn't do that. She didn't even know she was doing it, completely unaware. Finally, some other students pointed it out; they had been from New England.)
Yes, my first job was at an ice cream shop and there were some people that would ask for "vaniller ice cream". At that time I didn't realize some British accents did it too.
@@benw9949 It's a known thing that Mainers often pronounce our state capital as Auguster (it's Augusta), but drop the R's at the end of most every word that actually ends in R.
German here. Finally someone who manages to explain all these details. Obviously it takes a linguist to do this. The "English/American R" has always been the most difficult sound for me to make. Eventually I of course learnt that as well but I never met a language teacher who could explain this at all. He/She would give examples and we try to imitate ... the hard way.
It's a little above your R in German, but not trilled as it's an approximate. Try rounding your lips like making a W, as it's a combination almost like RW, with more of the R in the back, but not deepened like Höchdeutsch
i typically recommend all foreign speakers who struggle with it to just use a tap, its the easiest and nobody will think anything of it. if anything they'll think it's cooler
I met some elderly ladies in the far western tip of Austria, who used the trilled r exactly the same as we do in Afrikaans, and not at all like r taught in schools when learning Hochdeutsch.
Nowadays the High German (= 1. High German dialect continuum / 2. Standard German) uvular approximant [ʁ] is usually regarded to be the common German standard, the dialectal landscape on the other hand tells another story. The elderly ladies might have been from Vorarlberg, speaking a Low Alemannic variety, or western Tyrole (Lechtaler Alpen, Ausserfern) bordering the Swabian Allgäu. Covering the whole German area (incl. Low German) would go too far now, but the alveolar [r] phonemes were pretty much more common a century ago, throughout the High and Low German areas. Take the Upper German group, for example: For Bavarian (Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria, Upper Palantine and the majority of Austrian regions), the alveolar [r] is the common type (ignoring urban areas like Munich and Vienna). An interesting historical exception is found in the South Bavarian area (Southern and Eastern Tyrole, Carinthia and the isolated and still heavily archaic sounding settlements in Trentino [Valle del Fersina, even the Cimbrians of Luserna]), there the approximant has been dominant since the first linguistic observation in the 19th century. As for the alveolar, it is widely featured within the Alemannic group as well, like High Alemannic (Switzerland) and once the major eastern half of the Swabian area (to the east Bavarian Swabia, to the west the Upper Swabian region and part. West-Allgäu in Baden-Württemberg), today the use of the tongue's tip decreased rapidly in Baden-Württemberg. The westernmost Swabian parts along with the Low Alemannic cousin (the Upper Rhine: Baden, Alsace, Switzerland: Basel) might have been already characterized by an uvular type earlier in time. It's important to point out, besides the juxtaposition of both r types, in some areas and especially among people living in bigger cities, grown up with a kind of intermediate local variety (regiolect), less dialectal in lexical terms, phonetically still - by some more, by some less - strongly influenced by the respective local dialect. Occasionally, you can hear the use of both r sounds altogether with vocalized r's before consonants and in final positions. Although - sadly - I didn't grow up with a strong dialect, I speak the alveolar tap also intervocalic and before consonants, sometimes fully at the words final. I already had it from the start, yet, intentionally I increased it since my youth, I just prefer it, because the alveolar r creates a beautiful melody, especially when I read Standard German aloud (poetic language) and never ever would I dare to read Old High German samples with the uvular r for example. I have to admit, though. that the way I produce my r's in casual speech is inconsistent, I also tend to vocalize r's before consonants or at word finals, and even exchange the alveolar with the approximant automatically, not often, but it happens sometimes.
@@thurianwanderer Buddy, learning normal German, especially when, like me, you grow up in some random less than 100 people wine making village, nestled between 2 small mountains, only speaking the village dialect… it was very weird to say the least. In my dialect we use the alveolar tap (with a small trill every now and then) and you (traditionally) only drop the r‘s at the end of a word, if the vowel before it is an e (although we still sometimes pronounce it even then, although inconsistently). In words like Harm, Tier, Ohr, Uhr, Tür, etc. where the vowel before it isn’t an e, it’s always pronounced. Listening to standard German news used to infuriate me as a kid, because it always seemed like nobody could talk correctly. Still remember getting angry at some random news anchor pronouncing „Arbeit“ as „Ahhbeit“ and going livid 😂
I consider /ɹ/ to be a vowel. The Trilled R is actually a Trilled D which would be a rapid repitition of a consonant. 'word', 'dirt', 'hurt', & 'nerd' can all be phonetically spelled 'wrd', 'drt', 'hrt', & 'nrd'. The vowel can be modified by adding approximates but it's fundamentally just a vowel. We use the 'w' approximate to make the 'o' perform as a consonant in the word 'coordinate', but we aren't confused into believing that 'o' is a consonant. I use a simplified definition of a vowel. 1. Produced by vocal chords 2. Exits the mouth 3. Not combined with sounds produced by other mouth parts such as pops, clicks, hisses & whistles. 4. Can be sustained until you run out of breath. 5. Remains the same sound from beginning to end while sustained. The /ɹ/ meets all that criteria.
Fascinating! As a Southern American, I speak a rhotic dialect, with occasional non-rhotic drop-ins. (The non-rhotic Southern dialect is more common in older people and those living about 200 miles south of me.) The really interesting part about that is the rhotic comes back in when you get to the Gulf Coast. My accent is similar to singer Jimmy Buffet, who grew up in Mobile and Fairhope, AL, both coastal cities. Dialects and the history of English fascinate me, and you always have something interesting to discuss in your videos. I always learn something new. Thank you!
You're right the Northumbrian burr is rare now. When I was at school about 22 years ago our caretaker used it and he was about 50. When I worked at Northumberland County Council about a decade later, you'd generally hear it I'm a few people all over 60. When Raoul Moat was hiding out in the town of Rothbury I remember the news interviews a local and he said the word Rothbury using the burr which was nice to hear. Though I do think in another 20 years it will disappear altogether.
11:10 No idea if this is related, but I was keenly reminded of a similar peculiarity in Swedish pronunciation. In a lot of Swedish dialects, whenever "r" is followed by "s", the "r" does disappear, but also sort of melds with the "s" into a (Eng sp) "sh" sound. Even in cases where one word ends in "r" and the next begins with "s", which can be really confusing to learners. Similarly, when "r" is followed by "d" or "t", it modifies their pronunciation by folding the tip of the tongue back. Seems a lot of languages, not only Germanic ones, have a restless and indecisive relationship to the letter "r". ^_^ Hope that was interesting to someone.
I've been fascinated by the various 'r' sounds of british english ever since I came to the UK for post-graduate studies some time ago (unrelated, computer science). I'm a non-native english speaker (greek) and my main exposure to english pronunciation before I visited the island, was from predominantly american films and video games. What I found most fascinating, was the very pronounced linking-r one of my professors there used, which I had never encountered before, and sounded very strange to me initially. Very interesting to see this thorough analysis of how 'r' sounds evolved.
14:45 I just thought I’d chime in and add that this is roughly how the r-sound behaves in my native dialect of a Swedish. It’s generally a trill /r/ or tap /ɾ/ in a syllable oneset and an approximant /ɹ/ or voiced fricative /ӡ/ in a syllable coda. Coda-r is often elided completely at the ends of words but trigger r-sandhi if the following word starts with an alveolar consonant turning said consonant into its correspond retroflex equivalent.
In Brooklyn, New York there's a fading dialect in which /r/ becomes /oi/ AND vice versa: "That girl changes the oil" becomes "That goil changes the erl." My ex father in law grew up speaking that way, God rest him, and found our astonishment at his pronunciation really amusing. How does that double shift happen?
Thanks for another super interesting video, Simon. I always remember my (late) elderly neighbour who was from Alnwick and who had the wonderful Northumbrian burr as part of his speech. It was so distinctive. I’d never heard it before and have never heard it again, and I live in the north east.
I have two different variations of Violets that grow in my yard. I'm very careful not to mow it down, so it's spreading in my yard. I just love it. I also have some Bugleweed growing. It's considered an invasive plant by some because it's not native to this region (I live in Connecticut), but it attracts hummingbirds, song birds, bees, and butterflies, so I am leaving it. I think it's so pretty. St. John's Wort also grows in my yard. There's also some Japanese Quince and Chinese Boxthorn. I love walking around my yard, looking at all the plants and trees. I'm currently clearing an area in my backyard where I am going to have a Butterfly Garden. It's so nice to have warmer, sunnier days. I hope you're seeing warmer sunnier days too. I love hearing different dialects. I find it so interesting. I pronounce "sawing" differently than you. The second way you pronounced it was similar to how I pronounce it. You did a great job with this video. It was well researched and well presented. 😊❤
Your theoretical retroflex 's' as an intermediate stage between 'ars' and 'ass' is standard pronunciation i Swedish. So, 'rs' in Swedish word endings are pronounced with a single retroflex 'ş'.
The fact that Proto-Germanic z merged with r suggests to me that r was alveolar, not uvular, at that point. (z may have travelled through /ʒ/ to /r/ or something close to it)
When I was in college, I took a course in the American Phonetic Alphabet. The teacher had us listen to a recorded spoken passage and transcripe it in IPA. This was in New YOrk, and everybody transcribed all the R sounds wrong (we're part of the r-lesss community, dropping Rs all over the place). At the end of the semester, I took a box of alphabet macaroni for soup and picked out all the Rs and put them in a baggie - "just cleaning up all the Rs that got dropped here"
Being a native user of the alveolar approximant version from the middle of the USA, I struggled for a long time with why it would be called that. I could easily tell that there was a significant difference between the tongue positions of R and other "alveolar" sounds (N, T, D, S, Z), but couldn't define what that difference was. If I kept my tongue the same way it is for the other alveolars and pronounced an approximant, the sound I got seemed more like a Y than an R. I thought for a while that it's retroflex, but that ran me into trouble when I discovered a complete distinct set of IPA symbols for retroflexes, including an approximant, and started listening to languages that use them; their R is close to mine but still different. I finally ended up having to do it with my mouth open in front of a mirror to figure it out: the tongue is indeed curved/curled upward, but not at the tip; it's done at the sides! And other people around me sound like me, so I can only presume, without going around asking people to demonstrate for me with their mouths open, that this is also how others produce an alveolar R. That would also explain why Rs and laterals (the "L" family of sounds) can often seem so close to each other.
Absolutely wonderful video. There is no end to how much we can learn from just looking at this one sound. The original uvular R hypothesis is certainly interesting, but it still fails to describe certain other historical changes and modern synchronic shifts. One important one is the shift from PG /z/ to /r/ in most modern Germanic languages (albeit many of those subsequently lost it) and the alternations that also arise from that: see: is vs are, was vs were, also Dutch vriezen vs vroor. The Proto-Germanic r having been uvularized or otherwise dorsalized is certainly possible, however, and seems like a very attractive hypothesis. After all, we observe the pattern you mention in Old English that suggests strongly that at least some r sounds were laryngealized in some way. Modern American English seems to also have the propensity to laryngealize their r's. We also observe similar r sounds in modern Dutch, particularly in alveolar-r users of Brabantian who from my experience (thus purely anecdotally) use some kind of dorsalized alveolar trill in all positions. An original dorsalized r would further explain its propensity to turn uvular or approximate in so many Germanic languages (as opposed to Slavic or Romance languages, whose r's are consistently alveolar with the exception of languages who have been in prolonged and close contact with Germanic languages, such as French and Sorbian).
Not only is this a fascinating subject, compellingly explained, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the aesthetic of these videos. The (de)colouring, the period appropriate b-roll, the ambient bird song, the gentle vocal delivery - all complement the historical context and the subject matter perfectly. This is an exquisitely packaged art piece, as well as an interesting lecture. Bravo!
i find it interesting, the area where i live speaks pretty standard american english. some people, like you do, add the r to words like sawing, drawing, washing. (i live in WaRshington state, if you ask my grandmother.) it is common in older people i know, and sometimes in kids, but kids are often corrected and told to drop the r
Hey Simon is very early, but I remember a video that you made about the oldest stories in the world. That was very interesting it would be nice if you make a new version or re-upload that one, telling us the oldest stories that you know
Frankly I also find 'R' sond very interesting, though in my case it's about its realization in different languages rather than just in English. It's like everytime I learn about new language I find another way of pronouncing it. From Japanese R (or L since it's the same for natives) to throaty German, from liquid English to 'zh'-like Chinese.
This video is truly amazing! I'm not an English speaker, but I adore the English language. And the languages in general. I come from a Slavic language background. More specifically Russian & Ukrainian as my first languages. I developed a love for the English language and Germanic languages in general. So watching your video was very educational and inspiring to me. Even though, quite a bit of what was said probably flew over my head, because I, as a person who got educated in different fields, obviously lack the knowledge of linguistic terms and vocabulary.
I recall that in the 1950s a schoolfriend of mine introduced me to his grandmother who was from Northumberland. I found her speech quite difficult to understand and her pronunciation of my name, Ron Ferris, was really distinctive with uvular Rs. I am from southeast England. Very interesting video.
If I remember correctly, Limmy mentions in his autobiography that he was asked to tone down his accent for his TV series on BBC Scotland (and his lingering guilt at complying). So some features of his accent in that might be affectations to adopt a more standard, less working-class Glasgow accent! It might be interesting to compare with the presumably more natural accent he uses on his Twitch channel.
I haven't seen Limmy's series, but I remember him having segments in some of Charlie Brooker's programmes. I always used to completely tune out for those segments, because I couldn't make head or tail of them. I guessed that they were probably supposed to be funny in some way, since they were embedded in a comedy programme, but that was as far as my analysis could take me.
It is a shame that Scots have to accommodate ignorant foreigners. The English would never do it. The Welsh would never do it. The Northern Irish would never do it.
I've always found it interesting when people add that R in where there is none. I had a British employer who would call me "Jessic-euhr" even when my name was not followed by any word. On the other hand, here in New England you do sometimes hear that R between two words, I suppose because it sounds less choppy than two vowels together. If you have heard of the writer/lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, he asked her to change her first name to Lidian because otherwise people would have said "Lydier Emerson."
The 'Jessicker' thing can be because in at least some non-rhotic dialects of English, 'aa', 'ah' and 'ar' have all merged together into a single articulation. Which means that if you are taking a word from those dialects and trying to pronounce it with the 'r' sound articulated, it's - very dicey as to which articulation from the target dialect will end up being picked. I know people who have settled on not only 'Jessicker', but also 'Tabither', 'Dianner' and 'Rebeccker', because - they've been attempting to speak with a rhotic accent, but come from a non-rhotic background, and so they carry the merged sound with them into the target dialect and glue a whole lot of 'r' phonemes onto words that don't actually have them. So that employer might have been genuinely trying to pronounce your name properly - they just were failing to listen to the way you _actually_ pronounced it, and were instead relying on the way they _intuited_ it would be pronounced, based on their understanding of your dialect. Language is weird, sometimes.
@@overlordnatYeah my first thought was that I can't imagine a British person unfamiliar with the name "Jessica", must be a spy from somewhere else pretending to be British. 😂 But I have not any spent time with Brits trying to integrate into American society, only people living here. So I shouldn't assume that it cannot happen. They must have noticed that what we pronounce as "Olive" + schwa is pronounced "Olive-r" in their new home, and intuited that whenever a name they know as ending in a schwa sound belongs to an American it should likewise have an R on the end.
When I was studying English literature at Uni, most of my friends based their accents on modern variations of the English language, yet, as a back-then great Star Wars fan, I was drawn towards Peter Cushing and his amazing tapping Rs. That elegance on the speech couldn't be resisted by an impressionable youngster, and many teachers were quite offended by the election of such a peculiar way to sound.
In modern German, "ch" also has an agreement pattern with vowels. After back-vowels, (a,o,u), "ch" will be a sound made in back of the mouth, as you have shown in this video. When it is at the beginning of a syllable or after a front-vowel (e,i,ä,ö,ü) it will be a more fronted consonant (not unlike the sound at the beginning of "human"). Despite this fact, and the fact that we know there was vowel/consonant agreement in other situations in Old English, the "ch" seems to always be rendered as a back-mouth vowel by linguists, even when after an e or an i. As a German speaker, the very rapid glide in tongue-position this requires seems unnatural. I wonder if you have any thing to say about this, Simon?
Recently I have been binge watching the BBC's coverage of the general elections during the late fifties into 1979, and I'd like to point out that the prominent psephologist (his term for an elections analyst) Sir David Butler had a very prominent use of the labiodental approximant.
I'll have to look up what you mean because I don't know, but watching old election shows is one of my hobbies and I always noticed that David Butler exhibited unusual pronunciations of certain words and place names that even other people at the same time didn't use. For example he pronounced the place Southall in west London as "Suth-ell", in the same way that the racecourse in the Nottinghamshire town Southwell is still pronounced today, (although the other pronunciation is usually used when referring to the town by itself). Anyway, sorry to go off topic. That probably doesn't have anything to do with what you were talking about.
@@ajs41 I pronounce Southwell in London as Suth-ell. I thought that was the right way to pronounce it. I'll have to ask a true Londoner how they pronounce it
Doesn't "psephologist" just mean an election analyist? I don't know if other countries have famous psephologists but her in Australia Antony Green, is a national hero in some circles.
One thing that's not mentioned in this video is the absorption of vowels into following /r/s. Most (or at least many) Americans have a lot syllabic /r/s, e.g., in my dialect, "bird" = /brd/, her = /hr/, "work" = /wrk/, "burn" = /brn/ (with a retroflex /r/ in my case), whereas, in Irish English, all of these words would have actual vowels in these words FOLLOWED BY /r/, and there are no syllabic /r/s in their phonology at all (as far as I know, though I know there are a lot of varieties of Irish Englsh). These vowels in Irish English are reduced and have a more limited number of distinctions than they would without the following /r/, but there are still 2 or 3 different possibilities that correspond to the syllabic /r/ in American English. (My linguistics teacher (from California) didn't personally believe in describing English with a syllabic /r/, but I think he somewhat conceded the point, phonetically at least, when I pointed out that my tongue doesn't even move when I pronounce the word "her". It also doesn't independently move when I pronounce "purr", "burr", "whir" or "fur"/"fir", it doesn't move until after the /r/ in "herd", "word", "work", "bird", "burn", "fern", etc.m ==, and, when I pronounce "sure", it only moves by retracting slightly more than it needs to to stop the frication on the [ʃ].) Interestingly, the word "wort", as in "liverwort", does have an actual /o/ in it in my dialect, but that's probably just because I assumed it was pronounced the same as "wart", and maybe even learned the word in an English accent.
This is an IPA transcription thing. It is a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/ or a vowel /ɚ/. But you can't transcribe just plain /ɹ/ there, you have to mark it as syllabic at least.
Very Interesting video.And very useful and educative.I am a native Spanish speaker and the “r” sound in english, is the most challenging sound for me.It surprises me , though, why native english speakers didn’t understand me when I was rolling my “r” when I first move to england if this is also a feature in many english dialects.
Im trying to make a conlang based on my particular dialect of English which is a blend of Appalachian and midland english, which occurs in a small group of counties in ohio. This video has been very helpful. Thank you
When I listen to Simon, I think I can understand english because his accent is so clear, and It´s interesting how the "r" pronunciation defines as well the different ways of a dyalect, because the american and canadian "r" pronunciation is far known and very different of brittish or australian "r". As a permanent student of english, my preferences are always going to the UK accents.
I find myself talking about "r" with people all the time. I think it's one of the easiest ways of telling roughly where people are from. Also, very please about the Limmy references and sneaking in Jackson's iconic intro. Thanks for this video Simon! Such an interesting subject
Why would I skip forward and miss that fascinating information? 😄Your videos are always educational and usually make me amazed at all I have left to learn.
The Thrilled R in German was a lot more common in the past and southern Dialects. You can listen to it in Swiss German. I am from Southern Brazil and grew up listening to people around me speaking varied Dialects of German. Almost all of them Thrilled their Rs... a good person to is (sadly) Hitler has got that kind of accent being from Austria and Franz Beckenbauer too being from Bavaria. I believe that the Northern R has been replacing other varieties in the Standard german.
when i started working in Bristol a colleague asked to borrow a carrcalayer. after asking them to repeat their request and several moments of bewilderment, i eventually realised they were looking to perform mathematics with my electronic counting device
Thank you for making this wonderful video and for also delving into the evolution of the R sound in German! 😊 Learnt so much today. I live in Bavaria and everybody around here trills their Rs, including myself.
Very interesting, thanks. I'd always assumed the USA R was more influenced by the Irish version than the British, as it resembles the former more. Before you mentioned it I was already going to comment that in Dutch we have several interesting pronunciations of the R as well. I moved to Brussels from The South of the Netherlands a few years ago and started to wonder why in Belgium, only the Limburgers seem to speak with a French/German R, whereas in the south of the Netherlands everyone seems to speak with the French/German R. So I did some research and it seems like the rolling R is the original southern Dutch R, but it largely gor replaced in The Netherlands, but not in Belgium. The only example of souther Dutch in The Netherlands I could find with a rolling R, was in the village Stein, near Maastricht. I tild my parents, who are both from Maastricht about that and they hadn't been aware. Recently on my fathers 80th, which we celebrated in Maastricht, I overheard some Limburg sounding people with a rolling R. And thus t was prooved. Sort of. Enough for me. ;) Cheers!
@@AAA-fh5kd Hi. I'm not entirely sure what you're on about here but I think I get the gist. I've got no horse in the race, being Dutch but you certainly seem to... Nevertheless, that's an interesting observation regarding that non-rhoticity in certain accents in regions with historically high Irish immigration. I'm not an expert of the matter but my first question would be: Are adopting non-rhoticity and an R influenced by the Irish pronunciation, mutually exclusive? Also, how many Scottish regional accents are non-rhotic? I'm not well versed in the Scottish accents, so I can't think of any. Cheers.
@@AAA-fh5kd Okay. You're stating a lot of things here and honestly, it's a little hard to follow, partly because you seem to omit a lot of punctuation. I'm not making one claim or the other, all I said is I'd assumed the USA pronunciation of the letter R resembles the Irish way more than the British. I will add that there are British regional accents that resemble the USA pronunciation too. I can't point them out, as I'm not an expert in British accents, but I've heard them before. However, I get the sense that you're extremely keen on pointing out the USA R originated from British influence rather than Irish. So much so that it makes one wonder whether you have some sort of British nationalist sentiment behind that. Like I said, I'm Dutch, I've no horse in the race, nor do I really care. I just find these things interesting and I wonder about the origin of accents a lot. I've had a little listen at the Brahmin accent, and it does come across as uper class British in origin to me. Is there anyone else who can chyme in on this?
@@AAA-fh5kd Not entirely true. There are some working class Dublin accents that are traditionally non-rhotic, but these have been becoming weakly rhotic in more recent years.
@@AAA-fh5kd Thanks for clarifying. I was recovering from covid and I had more trouble focussing my eyes on text than normal. That may have contributed to the confusion too. It's all interesting stuff.
Just to let you know. English isn't a British language. It was introduced into the British Isles by the Germanic tribes which later developed into what we know as English today when England & English came into existence in 927AD after the Germanic Kingdoms united under one King. Then the Norman French change English further into the Germanic/Romance language you hear today.
I've heard that the non-rhoticity in England and the non-rhoticity in US East-Coast cities might sort of be one thing - the change happened around the turn of the 19th century, when there was still a lot of trade between England and US ports (despite the high tensions), and at the same time the Eastern inland was still pretty rural and disconnected. It's possible the change spread via sea route to the US, but then didn't spread into the Country. Note, the non-rhoticity of the Planter class (and by extention, Afro-American) came from the Southeast coast as well, while the modern (and somewhat obnoxiously rhotic) Southern accent comes from inland.
Did I miss something? I didn't hear mention of the dialect that pronounces the R as W. I think there's late night show host in England that speaks like this, and I e seen it movies as well. Think of Elmer Fudd's "Wascally Wabbit"
for most of my life, i thought the alveolar trill was a uvular trill. i'm brazilian, so even though people use the alveolar trill here, it's not phonemic, it's an allophone of our hard R (usually something along the lines of a /h/) and sounds very dated. so, as a child, whenever i tried to make that sound, i'd do a uvular trill. i only found out the actual articulation a few years back and it honestly baffles me how almost everyone can do it when it's impossible to me
Could the strange R sound in New Yoik actually be caused by continental Europeans such as italians and Germans trying to avoid the trill that was in their accent in an attempt to make the sound that they heard people who lived there making?
I believe that pronuncing r as i comes from Palermo in Sicily. Look up the video titled "Sicilian Language vs Italian vs Spanish vs Portuguese | Can they understand it?" from Ecolinguist to see what I mean. At 00:42 in that video you will hear the speaker pronounce Nord as Noid. This feature could also have come from German speakers, if you type in Furcht in Google Translate and hit the audio button, you will hear that the r is almost disappeared.
As a Northern Irishman starting out in voiceover, non-rhoticity is the bane of my life when I adopt an RP accent. My native accent has an almost overwhelming rhoticity, so I have to constantly watch it sneaks back in. Linking Rs are a particular difficulty for me as it's the opposite of what I'm trying to do - leave out the R. The opposite is also true (I suspect the phoneme you declined to say was the one I'm talking about) - Dame Judi Dench got an Oscar nomination playing a granny in Branagh's 'Belfast', but her non-rhoticity constantly betrayed her to the natives. It wasn't very close. My RP is most like (and influenced by) Partrick Stewart, a Yorkshireman, and thus someone who has suppressed his own rhotic accent. That may be why I have an easier time approximating him.
What about the rolled R that old theatre performers and announcers used? I've heard that was just done to make the speech more intelligible from a distance in the era before electrical amplification.
The old french up to recently has rolled r ; the gutural r is very récent like after the 2sd world war. Still in some french villages some old people roll their r
2:15 - 2:34 That labiodental approximant. I have heard it distinctly in two instances - Terry Jones of Monty Python and Rik Mayall in The Young Ones. Terry's LDA 'r' came off pronounced in some of his characters, but I could it hear it a bit in his natural speaking. It wasn't Mayall's natural speaking, but he laid it on thick in his portrayal of Rick. Thanks for putting this up.
Fascinating! I appreciate your ability to articulate the various sounds in addition to describing their formation. Even more, your ability to utilize the linguistic tools while explaining the sound changes to a layman is commendable and effective.
Brilliant content as always. One thing I guess I did want to point out though due to sheer population sizes, the vast majority of native English speakers are still rhotic when you consider the US and Canada (around 300m native speakers combined removing recent immigrants born speaking other languages). I know especially in the US there are non-rhotic regional dialects, but they are not large and as you noted and are actually shrinking. I'm also curious about the current state of 'r' at the start of words in the UK. I only have useless anecdotal evidence, but I swear in many of the British TH-cam channels, the initial 'R' sounds much more like a 'W' in contemporary speech (sorry for my terribly unscientific phonology). I know this is very unscientific, but I'm curious if looking at very modern speech and projecting forward if the 'R' phoneme is going through a similarly radical change in the UK like the "th" phoneme is (which always sounds like 'V' and 'F' to my American ears) for all of those that are not speaking the most precise 'RP'.
The letter r is the most intriguing and diverse one in English and in European languages in general. Possibly, also one of the hardest to pronounce in most of those languages.
In my area in the Netherlands, we have words that have several r's and each of these r's is pronounced differently. E.g. 'raar' and 'rare' (meaning strange, odd) , which is like old English rare.
If we're thinking in terms of cavemen, I think the "Runge, R" was produced amongst the first sounds - amongst the "ooh", "ooga", "auhm", and the "easier" grunts. It started getting complex when they started controlling the airflow. I would imagine that the "French" pronunciation of "R" came before any other pronunciations that require the tip of the tongue. And the various articulations that utilize the tip of the tongue developed afterwards. Just a perspective.
I tend to roll my R's but that's mostly because English being my second language, (My first is Czech) although I did learn English very young at about 6 years old I still instinctively pronounce my R's like a eastern European would.
I learn so much from your videos - still working on figuring out just what terms like "alveolar" mean, but I love how you present the various sounds, and hearing how they are mutated across time and space. :-)
This is absolutely fascinating! Thanks for researching it all and making the video. I sometimes wonder how all the variants of the /r/ sound can possibly be allophones, but this video explains how they are actually closer to one another than I realised.
As someone about 50 years your senior who has observed these differences from a very early age, I wish to say that I think you're very nearly always right.
My 'native dialect' is a conserative Canadian one. It is throughly 'rhotic', and I disike 'intrusive r' intensely. But I completely tolerate non-rhotic English with 'linking r', which to me sounds 'posh', as the characteristic speech of royalty, statesmen in my youth, and the great Shakespearian actors Richardson, Olivier, and Gielgud.
In the 16th c. there was a kind of speech (mostly southern English, I believe) in which r was lost before s and other alveolar consonants with no effect on the following consonant. Examples are 'ass' for 'arse' (now almost universal in North America) and 'passel' for 'parcel' (widespread but distinctly rustic). That got me into trouble when I worked on the Records of Early English Drama (REED) Project. Previous in-house editors had treated examples as scribal errors and corrected them in footnotes, but I insisted they were phonetic spellings and needed to be entered in the English Glossary. The General Editor disliked that because (1) it took up a bit more type, (2) it 'showed up' the work of my collagues, and (3) it appeared to be my own discovery, which in her eyes made it suspect. (In fact I distinctly remembered reading an article about it but never managed to chase that down.) She even sic'ed Peter Meredith on me in an effort to change my mind, but I stuck to my guns. That may have been a minor factor in my eventual dismissal.
Hiya Simon, another great vlog, my niece Charlotte cant understand the woman on the pronunciation off Cumbrian 1400-2020, she thinks its another language, it had me in stitches, this is Choppy in Whitehaven, Cumbria, England
One of the most obvious parts of an accent is its level of rhoticity or non-rhoticity. Now, rhoticity isn't really a one or the othuh\other type thing, instead, it's on a scale. For example, the non-rhotic American dialects tend to have rhoticity in what linguists call the "NURSE" set of words (work, girl, heard, surf, etc) and may be rhotic in the "CURE" set of words (cure, immured, surely, etc), even when the accent may be otherwise non-rhotic. Also, the rhoticity can be inconsistent, with someone sometimes dropping post vocalic R, sometimes pronouncing it.
To make things even more confusing, there are a few words where is silent even in completely rhotic speech because its silence in said words has nothing to do with rhoticity
Just come to think of how it's pronounced in swedish. My mothers family came from south-western sweden where they had a very interesting dialectal peculiarity. Which is that a 'strong' R, in the beginning of a word or in the stressed syllable, is pronounced like a french or german R, but otherwise pronounced with a mild tap which is the most common version in most of sweden. But it also brings up another feature of R in swedish more generally. That in most dialects before certain consonants the R disappears but changes how the consonant is pronounced (and often the vowel before it as well). So the 4 consonants where it does this are D, T, N, S. So in a word like "hård", the R disappears but the D is pronounced slightly differently than otherwise. And before an S it's basically pronounced like sh in english. Also before an L the R usually disappears and is occasionally sounding exactly as it would be pronounced in english with that little hint of an english R. Then we have the southernmost accents where all R's are pronounced like in your throat, and in Småland they mostly make diphtongs out of and hardly have any consonant there at all, and in swedish-speaking parts of Finland all R's are tapped or trilled. Stockholm also have all kinds of versions of the R-sound and you can often pinpoint which part of Stockholm someone comes from just by how they pronounce (or don't pronounce) this letter. It's a running theme that there usually seems to be 2-3 different variations of the sound in many dialects of swedish. In Öland for example the word "ringmuren", is pronounced so that the first R is a soft tap, like a scottish person would say it, the second is pronounced almost like an american would say it.
This was really interesting to me, I learned English growing up in Texas, and in California (about 1st grade)they made me take speech therapy for the way I pronounced my Rs. Sometimes throughout my life, my Rs have sounded a little off. I also suffer from bruxism that effects my front teeth. I’ve noticed over the years my, I guess accent shift a bit as my right front tooth has changed shape, etc. and Ss and Rs are effected as I talk, and I talk a lot! (Just ask my boss) so I hear myself saying things differently, as my teeth are pretty much constantly changing w the grinding. I think it’s so interesting to here all the different ways to pronounce Rs..! I like the trill, but if I start doing that people will really think I’m eccentric! I took German in hs, and my best friend is Dutch, so this video is particularly interesting to me, to hear the origins of R, and how well you demonstrate the pronunciations.
The Northumbrian ‘R’ is sometimes referred to as a ‘Percy R’ and is believed to be an adopted feature where an affectation of speech of Harry Hotspur, a Duke of Northumberland was actually copied as mark of admiration. Certainly, it was not universal in Northumbrian speech from the seventies on, people either had it or not. I have also noticed some occurrences of this in rural accents from counties Waterford and Cork which could be an import from the times of the banishment of border revivers to Ireland in Tudor times along with Northern English surnames eg Cuthbert, Musgrave, Stapleton.
I'm a Mandarin speaker. I found an interesting feature of the English "r" sound a couple of years after I started learning English. Both Mandarin and major English dialects have a similar pronunciation of "r". However, the English "r" seems to always come with a rounded-lip feature, or pronounce like "wr", but textbooks and dictionaries of English never show the /w/ sound in the IPA of words, and some even tell us the letter "w" in the combination "wr" is silent. Being a beginner, I stuck to IPA very much, believing it represented the real pronunciation, until I incidentally got to compare the pronunciation of Mandarin "rou" (meaning "meat") and English "roe" (or "row"). I found that my lips didn't have much movement for "rou" but had an expanding movement for "roe". Then I suddenly realized why some American-born Chinese singers sounded so unnatural when they said Mandarin words beginning with "r". They just simply took the English way of pronouncing it. They said "rou", "ren" (meaning "human"), and "ranhou" (meaning "then") like "rwou", "rwen", and "rwanhou". So the truth is, it's not that the "w" preceding "r" is silent, but all "r"s except those following "w" omit the letter "w" that represents a lip-rounding feature. The English "roe" is actually the Mandarin word "rou" superposed with the English word "woe" if ignoring the slight difference between Mandarin's /ɻ/ and English's /ɹ/ and between the vowels. I know there was probably a sharp distinction between "r" and "wr" when "r" was still a flap or a thrill, but today it's apparently "r" that gets assimilated to "wr" rather than the opposite. I hope teachers and textbooks of English can stop telling English learners that the "w" in "wr" is silent but instead that the English "r" has an invisible lip-rounding feature, if they would like their students to have a pronunciation that sounds natural to native English speakers.
The Mandarin "r" is also quite idiosyncratic in that in more Northern areas, it's often pronounced much more akin to the French soft "j" as in "Jacques".
I love how people are comparing the pronunciations with that of their native languages!! I find it amazing to see not just the differences but also very much the similarities in languages that are otherwise so very different..
Thank you for sharing 😊❤️
@@Prismaticist I would say it is similar to Czech voiced ř
@@DaReconquistador I have heard that r-háček type pronunciation in taiwanese mandarin, that’s how I learned to say it
@@pannekook2000 are you Czech native speaker?
Fun fact: this change from tap R to approximant alveolar R is happening right now in some brazilian portuguese dialects, specially when R is in coda position.
As I understand it, this is typical of the paulistano and caipira dialects, yes? Wouldn’t the r in coda position be more of a [h] or [x] rather than a tap in most dialects?
I've heard that the alveolar R occurs in Paraguayan Spanish as well, is it possible that this is a vestige of indigenous languages in the region?
This is happening in Costa Rican Spanish as well. It's fascinating
could it be english influence or not?
I’m assuming in São Paulo? Not in Rio or Minas. What about Parana or SC?
Simon Roper is our Linguist Hobbit, a true treasure. Even the rural environment is top notch.
Keep them coming. Congratulations for the great job you are doing.
Cheers 👍💐🙏🌹
As a Scot, I must admit that I love the sound of letter "R".
As non-Scot I completely agree!
Totally unrelated to linguistics but the plant outside your kitchen window is called Green Alkanet(Pentaglottis sempervirens).
Knowing Frisian, it's always fun to see these evolutions, as many of the things you state here for Old English still are true for modern Frisian (outside of the cities that were more heavily influenced by Dutch). Also the northeastern part of Frisia has had an influx of Prussian workers 150 years ago, so there they are somewhere in between Germanic and Frisian for pronunciation of some words, which make the nuances in sounds even more recognisable (including the R).
Wear Frisian is on my list to learn
Would you be able to translate a short story into Frisian at all please?
@@Ggdivhjkjl 'Kinsto ek in koart ferhaaltsje oersette yn it Frysk asjeblieft?'
HEY! Another Friesian!! Hoi!!
Yeah, all that is true..
There also seems to be a Danish influence in Friesian as well though..
A lot of regular Dutch folks won't understand much from people living in the provinces roughly above the Rhine when they speak the local languages (Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe)..
Some of that goes back to the Romans.. the Rhine was one of the borders of the Roman Empire for a long time..
😊❤️
@@MrEnaric lmao, I don't think *that* was what they meant for you to translate but well done 😊❤️
Fun fact: some northeastern American accents include the linking "r" and even add it to the ends of words when there isn't even a link. For example "vaniller ice cream" and "idear" (for "idea").
Had a friend from poland, who would say "idear" Thought that this was something from Europe, but later on, heard lots of the academic types in NE say it like that.
drawring
@@Ma1nspr1ng Weirdly, if I do accidentally shove dark l's, but l's often switch into tapped r's. TR hasn't merged with CHR at all, SH gets shoved further in the mouth in certain positions. TCH/CH often. Drawling and drawing get confused due to that. Probably due to all vowels are getting deeper in the mouth, so vowel distinction is used more to compensate. T's often drop like flies. Hiatus can easily lose the t without much difference, knowing it was there to begin with.
@@Ma1nspr1ng And that peculiar phenomenon in England whereby 'draw' and 'drawer' sound the same.
This morning I was extremely down and under immense stress. The wonderfully relaxing sound of Simon Roper's voice brought me relief. There is something magical about his videos, metaphysical qualities, for certain. I love it and am a big fan. Apart from that I find a lot of his videos interesting as a Dutch student of real English.
I'd listen to audiobooks read by him
I was laying down after an asthma event. I saw that Simon's video was up and immediately clicked. Like you, I'm glad for his calming voice.
Real English? Here we go again!
I’m sorry you felt that way, I am happy that you found relief. I hope you find long term solutions to preventing such dire situations
@@TheSoulBlossom As an American, I took that to mean that spoken by native English speakers rather than school ESL English.
Seriously, you should narrate bedtimes stories to children. I can't believe listening to TH-camrs about linguistics can be this calming.
Wales has this funny thing where we have southern-english style non-rhotic accents, scottish-style rhotic accents (particularly by Welsh speakers) and non-rhotic accents with a flapped pronunciation at the same time. In my experience, these are completely random in distribution, as I've heard all three just in my county, which is overwhelmingly English-Speaking, and I've heard all three up in a majority Welsh-speaking area in Gwynedd too
The Welsh sound like Swiss-Italians who are trying to sound Scottish.
There are also southern-English style rhotic or marginally rhotic accents where I'm from near the border with England (i.e. with the approximant, either strong or subtle). So even more variety!
Rhotics are so fascinating, there's something so distinctive about them in most languages and yet looking at their cross-linguistic variability, one really struggles to identify one unifying feature. Thanks for the deep dive into this topic, and all the beautiful footage you interspersed it with.
I don't think so. Probably just transcription. The letters. Writing system has a huge influence. I'm not convinced the idea of 'phonemes' is all that distinct from the alphabet.
A common 'rhotic' consonant, [ɾ], is also taken as /d/ for all the native Englishspeakers who produce it as an allophone of /t, d/ intervocalically (which is most of them). /d/ is the phoneme and letter they would hear and write it as.
@@skyworm8006 "I'm not convinced the idea of 'phonemes' is all that distinct from the alphabet."
What do you mean by this? The way you worded it I'd disagree heavily, but I could have misunderstood.
This is a bit exaggerated, as Brita Borg was from Stockholm, but in my part of Sweden (the northern part of the west coast) this pronunciation is natural to many people: th-cam.com/video/BG_hh_f9ANg/w-d-xo.html
Me, watching with headphones on a train:
🗣️🤳 "R...r... rr... rr...."
😆 That's me with earbuds on, as I'm out picking up dog poo from the yard, probably to the bewilderment of my neighbors with their sliding door open at their balcony overlooking my yard.
I'm a choral singer in the US and very early on we're taught to avoid American rhotic R's when singing classical tradition English music. They sound incorrect for the tradition and cause difficulties with classical singing technique which tries to keep clean transitions between consonants and vowels
Same here. American choir singer, its funny because americans sound british when they sing in choirs, but most British artists who do solo songs choose to sound American
@@nostalgiatrip7331 the only times we were allowed American R's was for music in the American musical theater tradition - which certainly would have sounded weird sung without them!
In country music the singers like to put a lot of emphasis on that rhotic r, once you notice it it really stands out. Irish folk music also does it a lot, too. I've always wanted to hear a choir that sings a classic piece with full weight on the r, just cause.
@@jared_bowden love the Ray Charles example in the video too. Never noticed Georgians dropped Rs but now that I think of "Geo'gia on my mind," of course they do!
@@nostalgiatrip7331 Thats cool. I've noticed how much more relaxed American English sounds than British English. Its just great for singing in, as it gives a smoother flow. On the other hand, when listening to angsty, English Punk and New Wave recently, the harder consonants of British English increased the sense of jarring emotions that the song was expressing.
Fun fact: in Dutch, the trilled "R" is considered the common everyday variant, while the fricative version is considered the posh variant.
I feel like the fricatives are more common nowadays, especially on TV also.
I also feel like the trilled R is usually a tongue tap R for younger people.
I only ever hear a really hear a real rolling R when to speaking to very old people or foreigners.
@@Thomas.c4647 Dude, your profile pic is cringe AF.
Nationalisme is kanker.
@@VRSVLVS niks mis mee. Jij mag van mij best een communist zijn hoor.
@@Thomas.c4647 Nationalisme is een ideologie gebaseerd op de mythe van de natie-staat. Ze dient enkel om de kapitalistische status-quo te bestendigen door de arbeidersklasse langs arbitraire lijnen te verdelen. Of erger, ze is de basis voor reactionaire ideologiën die de maatschappelijke verhoudingen wil terugwerpen naar sterk hierarchische en feodale verhoudingen. Ze leid tot niets anders dan de exclusie en discriminatie van minderheden en inter-imperialistische conflicten. Enkel de elites gedijen bij nationalisme. En een ieder die denkt de "globalistische elites" te kunnen bestrijden middels nationalisme heeft zich laten bedonderen door de locale bourgeoisie en kleinburgerij.
Kortom, alles is mis met nationalisme. Er rest ons dus niets dan de ideën van het nationalisme met vastberaden felheid te bestrijden als we een wereld willen creëren vrij van uitbuiting, discriminatie en onderdrukking.
@@VRSVLVS ik was hier niet gekomen voor een politieke discussie, maar nu je toch bezig bent... Het is niet vaak dat ik een communist tegenkom, zie je.
Je spreekt van een globalistische elite in je betoog. Bestaat deze globalistische elite volgens jou en zo ja wat vind jij van deze ontwikkeling?
Hierna stel ik voor dat wij verder gaan met onze gang van zaken.
A very interesting discussion about the sound of "r" in the multitudinous variants of English. I'm an American English speaker, born in New York City, raised in Philadelphia, with parents that came from Boston; so I grew up with these different accents. A Bostonian would never be mistaken for a New Yorker and the Philadelphia accent is different from both Boston and New York. There are those that claim a Long Island accent is different and distinguishable from that of Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, but I doubt it. I never could really make those distinctions. However, there is a kind of "r" and "a" and their combination in words like "barn" and "farm" from the "down East" regions of Maine and northern New Hampshire which to my ear is quite distinct from the Boston accents of my parents. This northern, rural New England accent (some would call it a "Yankee" accent) might be related to early variants of English from England, but I would like to know your thoughts about it.
I've read that the "throat R" arrived to Copenhagen ca 1780, and to Southern Norway ca 1800. One of my ancestors, born ca 1805 some 40 km into the land was the last person in that municipality sticking to the traditional "rolling R" [some people appear to manage to roll the "throat R", e.g., Edith Piaf in "No, je ne regret rien", and Roy Orbison in some of his "growls"]. Norway also has a "thick L" which kind of overlaps with R, e.g., the word "gård" is pronounced almost like "gå:L". ["gård" = farm, or (back) yard. I assume this word ("gård") is related to "gjerde" (= fence), and to guard, garden, yard, as well as to Slavic city names with the word "gorod"; the vikings referred to Constantinopel as "Miklagard", the big "city".]
Interesting to see how the Scottish dialect has preserved more of the pronounciation of old "Anglo-Saxon". Including the "thrilling R".
In my youth (the '60s) in the Netherlands the thrilling R was considered the "proper pronounciation". Children that pronounced the R in a different way were sent to the logopedist. But we don't do that anymore nowadays ...
kinda like how some english dialects have a labiodetal approximant for a rhotic while in other areas this iz considered wrong
hello Simon, thank you again for your amazing work. I hope you are being supported in some way to free up your time to make these videos. What a thing to be so knowledgable and so generous with your knowledge. I find it so exciting you aren't just following the trail of so many other intellectuals, you are cutting your own groove and my god is it appreciated! Keep up the amazing work, best wishes, B
Simon, there's yet another pronunciation of "R", I think. I spent a couple of summers in Dublin and noticed that some speakers pronounced R as a retroflex tap [ɽ] before vowels. I'm pretty sure it's a retroflex tap, since I have that sound in my native dialect of Norwegian (where it's a realisation of L in some positions and Old Norse RÐ).
Would you please write us an example?
@@eliasbragin746 Well, I remember street salespeople shouting "sigarettes", and I definitely heard that "R" as a retroflex tap.
I would be fascinated if you could find some sort of example, maybe a recording, of what you're talking about. As an Irishman (albeit not from Dublin) I can't say that I have ever heard this realisation of the R phoneme to my knowledge, and I'm having trouble even imagining it. Though I would hesitate to tell you that your ears lied to you!
@@Tommat194 , it is also possible that he happened to hear a person with pronunciation defects or from another locality. No one is protected from a strange case after all.
I don't know what a retroflex tap is but do you mean for example in the word 'rabbit' the tongue is curled back on itself, combined with the jaw being pulled back towards the throat? If so, I know what ya mean, lad.
I haven’t watched the video yet but I’m looking forward to hearing about the Northumbrian Burr
Can we take a moment to appreciate the wholesome comment section of this man's videos?
Awesome to see 😊❤️
As someone with a rhotic dialect, I think intrusive R is a super interesting feature. Before having any education in linguistics, I found it pretty odd that in that Billy Joel song, he says "Brenda(r) and Eddie". It really stood out as an odd pronunciation to me. I love the in depth explanations from this channel for the little things we don't think about all that often.
@@AAA-fh5kd I've heard "warsh" for standard "wash" /ah/ from (mostly rural) American speakers. Adding the -R at the end of words with a vowel (tomater and tobacker) and things like "schoolmarm" with the R intruding, seem to be a form of hypercorrecting from older generations from pioneer-era speech, where people who were not so literate might read or write with that R added to try to mimic the R-dropping Northern / Eastern American speech (educated) or British speech (also seen as educated, except that those American pioneer settlers tended to keep the R in their own dialect, so they pronounced it or added it in between, even when it didn't belong, or when an AH or prolonged AA would be done (R-colored) in a British R.P. or American New Englander / Yankee pronunciation. -- However, that "linking" R (liaison) added between vowels between words, like "Brenda-R-and-Eric" seems to be a feature mostly for some New England accents (dialects), possibly more old-fashioned now. I've heard Norrtheasterners do it without knowing they do it, while Southerners and Southwesterneres hear it and think it's laughable and non-standard. (For example, a substitute teacher when I was in school got laughed at by half the class because she habitually added the R between words with vowels., and our part of the country doesn't do that. She didn't even know she was doing it, completely unaware. Finally, some other students pointed it out; they had been from New England.)
Yes, my first job was at an ice cream shop and there were some people that would ask for "vaniller ice cream". At that time I didn't realize some British accents did it too.
@@AAA-fh5kd My high school English teacher said "idear". That was over 20 years ago though.
@@AAA-fh5kd interesting... my grandmother had intrusive r (warsh) and her great-grands were Scots-Irish who migrated to Canada
@@benw9949 It's a known thing that Mainers often pronounce our state capital as Auguster (it's Augusta), but drop the R's at the end of most every word that actually ends in R.
German here. Finally someone who manages to explain all these details. Obviously it takes a linguist to do this. The "English/American R" has always been the most difficult sound for me to make. Eventually I of course learnt that as well but I never met a language teacher who could explain this at all. He/She would give examples and we try to imitate ... the hard way.
It's a little above your R in German, but not trilled as it's an approximate. Try rounding your lips like making a W, as it's a combination almost like RW, with more of the R in the back, but not deepened like Höchdeutsch
i typically recommend all foreign speakers who struggle with it to just use a tap, its the easiest and nobody will think anything of it. if anything they'll think it's cooler
I met some elderly ladies in the far western tip of Austria, who used the trilled r exactly the same as we do in Afrikaans, and not at all like r taught in schools when learning Hochdeutsch.
Nowadays the High German (= 1. High German dialect continuum / 2. Standard German) uvular approximant [ʁ] is usually regarded to be the common German standard, the dialectal landscape on the other hand tells another story. The elderly ladies might have been from Vorarlberg, speaking a Low Alemannic variety, or western Tyrole (Lechtaler Alpen, Ausserfern) bordering the Swabian Allgäu. Covering the whole German area (incl. Low German) would go too far now, but the alveolar [r] phonemes were pretty much more common a century ago, throughout the High and Low German areas. Take the Upper German group, for example: For Bavarian (Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria, Upper Palantine and the majority of Austrian regions), the alveolar [r] is the common type (ignoring urban areas like Munich and Vienna). An interesting historical exception is found in the South Bavarian area (Southern and Eastern Tyrole, Carinthia and the isolated and still heavily archaic sounding settlements in Trentino [Valle del Fersina, even the Cimbrians of Luserna]), there the approximant has been dominant since the first linguistic observation in the 19th century. As for the alveolar, it is widely featured within the Alemannic group as well, like High Alemannic (Switzerland) and once the major eastern half of the Swabian area (to the east Bavarian Swabia, to the west the Upper Swabian region and part. West-Allgäu in Baden-Württemberg), today the use of the tongue's tip decreased rapidly in Baden-Württemberg. The westernmost Swabian parts along with the Low Alemannic cousin (the Upper Rhine: Baden, Alsace, Switzerland: Basel) might have been already characterized by an uvular type earlier in time.
It's important to point out, besides the juxtaposition of both r types, in some areas and especially among people living in bigger cities, grown up with a kind of intermediate local variety (regiolect), less dialectal in lexical terms, phonetically still - by some more, by some less - strongly influenced by the respective local dialect. Occasionally, you can hear the use of both r sounds altogether with vocalized r's before consonants and in final positions. Although - sadly - I didn't grow up with a strong dialect, I speak the alveolar tap also intervocalic and before consonants, sometimes fully at the words final. I already had it from the start, yet, intentionally I increased it since my youth, I just prefer it, because the alveolar r creates a beautiful melody, especially when I read Standard German aloud (poetic language) and never ever would I dare to read Old High German samples with the uvular r for example. I have to admit, though. that the way I produce my r's in casual speech is inconsistent, I also tend to vocalize r's before consonants or at word finals, and even exchange the alveolar with the approximant automatically, not often, but it happens sometimes.
What is the difference between afrikaans and dutch
@@thurianwanderer Buddy, learning normal German, especially when, like me, you grow up in some random less than 100 people wine making village, nestled between 2 small mountains, only speaking the village dialect… it was very weird to say the least. In my dialect we use the alveolar tap (with a small trill every now and then) and you (traditionally) only drop the r‘s at the end of a word, if the vowel before it is an e (although we still sometimes pronounce it even then, although inconsistently). In words like Harm, Tier, Ohr, Uhr, Tür, etc. where the vowel before it isn’t an e, it’s always pronounced. Listening to standard German news used to infuriate me as a kid, because it always seemed like nobody could talk correctly. Still remember getting angry at some random news anchor pronouncing „Arbeit“ as „Ahhbeit“ and going livid 😂
I consider /ɹ/ to be a vowel. The Trilled R is actually a Trilled D which would be a rapid repitition of a consonant.
'word', 'dirt', 'hurt', & 'nerd' can all be phonetically spelled 'wrd', 'drt', 'hrt', & 'nrd'.
The vowel can be modified by adding approximates but it's fundamentally just a vowel. We use the 'w' approximate to make the 'o' perform as a consonant in the word 'coordinate', but we aren't confused into believing that 'o' is a consonant.
I use a simplified definition of a vowel.
1. Produced by vocal chords
2. Exits the mouth
3. Not combined with sounds produced by other mouth parts such as pops, clicks, hisses & whistles.
4. Can be sustained until you run out of breath.
5. Remains the same sound from beginning to end while sustained.
The /ɹ/ meets all that criteria.
Fascinating! As a Southern American, I speak a rhotic dialect, with occasional non-rhotic drop-ins. (The non-rhotic Southern dialect is more common in older people and those living about 200 miles south of me.) The really interesting part about that is the rhotic comes back in when you get to the Gulf Coast. My accent is similar to singer Jimmy Buffet, who grew up in Mobile and Fairhope, AL, both coastal cities. Dialects and the history of English fascinate me, and you always have something interesting to discuss in your videos. I always learn something new. Thank you!
You're right the Northumbrian burr is rare now. When I was at school about 22 years ago our caretaker used it and he was about 50. When I worked at Northumberland County Council about a decade later, you'd generally hear it I'm a few people all over 60.
When Raoul Moat was hiding out in the town of Rothbury I remember the news interviews a local and he said the word Rothbury using the burr which was nice to hear.
Though I do think in another 20 years it will disappear altogether.
11:10 No idea if this is related, but I was keenly reminded of a similar peculiarity in Swedish pronunciation. In a lot of Swedish dialects, whenever "r" is followed by "s", the "r" does disappear, but also sort of melds with the "s" into a (Eng sp) "sh" sound. Even in cases where one word ends in "r" and the next begins with "s", which can be really confusing to learners. Similarly, when "r" is followed by "d" or "t", it modifies their pronunciation by folding the tip of the tongue back. Seems a lot of languages, not only Germanic ones, have a restless and indecisive relationship to the letter "r". ^_^
Hope that was interesting to someone.
I've been fascinated by the various 'r' sounds of british english ever since I came to the UK for post-graduate studies some time ago (unrelated, computer science). I'm a non-native english speaker (greek) and my main exposure to english pronunciation before I visited the island, was from predominantly american films and video games. What I found most fascinating, was the very pronounced linking-r one of my professors there used, which I had never encountered before, and sounded very strange to me initially. Very interesting to see this thorough analysis of how 'r' sounds evolved.
14:45 I just thought I’d chime in and add that this is roughly how the r-sound behaves in my native dialect of a Swedish. It’s generally a trill /r/ or tap /ɾ/ in a syllable oneset and an approximant /ɹ/ or voiced fricative /ӡ/ in a syllable coda. Coda-r is often elided completely at the ends of words but trigger r-sandhi if the following word starts with an alveolar consonant turning said consonant into its correspond retroflex equivalent.
I find it fascinating that you’ve put so much thought into the letter “R”. This was very interesting, Simon.
In Brooklyn, New York there's a fading dialect in which /r/ becomes /oi/ AND vice versa: "That girl changes the oil" becomes "That goil changes the erl." My ex father in law grew up speaking that way, God rest him, and found our astonishment at his pronunciation really amusing. How does that double shift happen?
Archie Bunker dialect. "Trlet" for 'toilet'. "Little goil".
Thanks for another super interesting video, Simon. I always remember my (late) elderly neighbour who was from Alnwick and who had the wonderful Northumbrian burr as part of his speech. It was so distinctive. I’d never heard it before and have never heard it again, and I live in the north east.
I have two different variations of Violets that grow in my yard. I'm very careful not to mow it down, so it's spreading in my yard. I just love it. I also have some Bugleweed growing. It's considered an invasive plant by some because it's not native to this region (I live in Connecticut), but it attracts hummingbirds, song birds, bees, and butterflies, so I am leaving it. I think it's so pretty. St. John's Wort also grows in my yard. There's also some Japanese Quince and Chinese Boxthorn. I love walking around my yard, looking at all the plants and trees. I'm currently clearing an area in my backyard where I am going to have a Butterfly Garden. It's so nice to have warmer, sunnier days. I hope you're seeing warmer sunnier days too.
I love hearing different dialects. I find it so interesting. I pronounce "sawing" differently than you. The second way you pronounced it was similar to how I pronounce it.
You did a great job with this video. It was well researched and well presented. 😊❤
Your theoretical retroflex 's' as an intermediate stage between 'ars' and 'ass' is standard pronunciation i Swedish. So, 'rs' in Swedish word endings are pronounced with a single retroflex 'ş'.
The fact that Proto-Germanic z merged with r suggests to me that r was alveolar, not uvular, at that point. (z may have travelled through /ʒ/ to /r/ or something close to it)
When I was in college, I took a course in the American Phonetic Alphabet. The teacher had us listen to a recorded spoken passage and transcripe it in IPA. This was in New YOrk, and everybody transcribed all the R sounds wrong (we're part of the r-lesss community, dropping Rs all over the place). At the end of the semester, I took a box of alphabet macaroni for soup and picked out all the Rs and put them in a baggie - "just cleaning up all the Rs that got dropped here"
Being a native user of the alveolar approximant version from the middle of the USA, I struggled for a long time with why it would be called that. I could easily tell that there was a significant difference between the tongue positions of R and other "alveolar" sounds (N, T, D, S, Z), but couldn't define what that difference was. If I kept my tongue the same way it is for the other alveolars and pronounced an approximant, the sound I got seemed more like a Y than an R. I thought for a while that it's retroflex, but that ran me into trouble when I discovered a complete distinct set of IPA symbols for retroflexes, including an approximant, and started listening to languages that use them; their R is close to mine but still different. I finally ended up having to do it with my mouth open in front of a mirror to figure it out: the tongue is indeed curved/curled upward, but not at the tip; it's done at the sides! And other people around me sound like me, so I can only presume, without going around asking people to demonstrate for me with their mouths open, that this is also how others produce an alveolar R. That would also explain why Rs and laterals (the "L" family of sounds) can often seem so close to each other.
R/L - tell it to the Japanese!
Absolutely wonderful video. There is no end to how much we can learn from just looking at this one sound.
The original uvular R hypothesis is certainly interesting, but it still fails to describe certain other historical changes and modern synchronic shifts. One important one is the shift from PG /z/ to /r/ in most modern Germanic languages (albeit many of those subsequently lost it) and the alternations that also arise from that: see: is vs are, was vs were, also Dutch vriezen vs vroor. The Proto-Germanic r having been uvularized or otherwise dorsalized is certainly possible, however, and seems like a very attractive hypothesis. After all, we observe the pattern you mention in Old English that suggests strongly that at least some r sounds were laryngealized in some way. Modern American English seems to also have the propensity to laryngealize their r's. We also observe similar r sounds in modern Dutch, particularly in alveolar-r users of Brabantian who from my experience (thus purely anecdotally) use some kind of dorsalized alveolar trill in all positions. An original dorsalized r would further explain its propensity to turn uvular or approximate in so many Germanic languages (as opposed to Slavic or Romance languages, whose r's are consistently alveolar with the exception of languages who have been in prolonged and close contact with Germanic languages, such as French and Sorbian).
Then why did old Germanic texts exclusively use if they used an uvular pronunciation?
I claim exactly the opposite: that it was not uvular but laryngealized (for example some kind of uvularized or velarized alveolar r)
Not only is this a fascinating subject, compellingly explained, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the aesthetic of these videos. The (de)colouring, the period appropriate b-roll, the ambient bird song, the gentle vocal delivery - all complement the historical context and the subject matter perfectly. This is an exquisitely packaged art piece, as well as an interesting lecture. Bravo!
i find it interesting, the area where i live speaks pretty standard american english. some people, like you do, add the r to words like sawing, drawing, washing. (i live in WaRshington state, if you ask my grandmother.) it is common in older people i know, and sometimes in kids, but kids are often corrected and told to drop the r
Hey Simon is very early, but I remember a video that you made about the oldest stories in the world. That was very interesting it would be nice if you make a new version or re-upload that one, telling us the oldest stories that you know
Frankly I also find 'R' sond very interesting, though in my case it's about its realization in different languages rather than just in English. It's like everytime I learn about new language I find another way of pronouncing it. From Japanese R (or L since it's the same for natives) to throaty German, from liquid English to 'zh'-like Chinese.
The pharyngealization of vowels preceding r that Limmy does is also a prominent feature of the Saxonian dialect of German!
This video is truly amazing! I'm not an English speaker, but I adore the English language. And the languages in general. I come from a Slavic language background. More specifically Russian & Ukrainian as my first languages. I developed a love for the English language and Germanic languages in general. So watching your video was very educational and inspiring to me. Even though, quite a bit of what was said probably flew over my head, because I, as a person who got educated in different fields, obviously lack the knowledge of linguistic terms and vocabulary.
What do you mean, “I’m not an English speaker”? You are speaking English! Lol
Here in New England, some speakers even attach intrusive Rs to words ending in the "ah" and "uh" sounds when they're *not* followed by another vowel.
John Kennedy: "Cuber".
I recall that in the 1950s a schoolfriend of mine introduced me to his grandmother who was from Northumberland. I found her speech quite difficult to understand and her pronunciation of my name, Ron Ferris, was really distinctive with uvular Rs. I am from southeast England. Very interesting video.
Oh that's some cool Northumbrian burr right there!
You ‘splain things really well. Always enjoy your content, and look forward to the next. Thank you, Simon.
If I remember correctly, Limmy mentions in his autobiography that he was asked to tone down his accent for his TV series on BBC Scotland (and his lingering guilt at complying). So some features of his accent in that might be affectations to adopt a more standard, less working-class Glasgow accent! It might be interesting to compare with the presumably more natural accent he uses on his Twitch channel.
I haven't seen Limmy's series, but I remember him having segments in some of Charlie Brooker's programmes. I always used to completely tune out for those segments, because I couldn't make head or tail of them. I guessed that they were probably supposed to be funny in some way, since they were embedded in a comedy programme, but that was as far as my analysis could take me.
It is a shame that Scots have to accommodate ignorant foreigners. The English would never do it. The Welsh would never do it. The Northern Irish would never do it.
I've always found it interesting when people add that R in where there is none. I had a British employer who would call me "Jessic-euhr" even when my name was not followed by any word. On the other hand, here in New England you do sometimes hear that R between two words, I suppose because it sounds less choppy than two vowels together. If you have heard of the writer/lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, he asked her to change her first name to Lidian because otherwise people would have said "Lydier Emerson."
The 'Jessicker' thing can be because in at least some non-rhotic dialects of English, 'aa', 'ah' and 'ar' have all merged together into a single articulation. Which means that if you are taking a word from those dialects and trying to pronounce it with the 'r' sound articulated, it's - very dicey as to which articulation from the target dialect will end up being picked. I know people who have settled on not only 'Jessicker', but also 'Tabither', 'Dianner' and 'Rebeccker', because - they've been attempting to speak with a rhotic accent, but come from a non-rhotic background, and so they carry the merged sound with them into the target dialect and glue a whole lot of 'r' phonemes onto words that don't actually have them.
So that employer might have been genuinely trying to pronounce your name properly - they just were failing to listen to the way you _actually_ pronounced it, and were instead relying on the way they _intuited_ it would be pronounced, based on their understanding of your dialect.
Language is weird, sometimes.
Was this employer from the West Country? I don’t see how they could be from anywhere else in Britain with that pronunciation.
@@overlordnatYeah my first thought was that I can't imagine a British person unfamiliar with the name "Jessica", must be a spy from somewhere else pretending to be British. 😂 But I have not any spent time with Brits trying to integrate into American society, only people living here. So I shouldn't assume that it cannot happen.
They must have noticed that what we pronounce as "Olive" + schwa is pronounced "Olive-r" in their new home, and intuited that whenever a name they know as ending in a schwa sound belongs to an American it should likewise have an R on the end.
When I was studying English literature at Uni, most of my friends based their accents on modern variations of the English language, yet, as a back-then great Star Wars fan, I was drawn towards Peter Cushing and his amazing tapping Rs.
That elegance on the speech couldn't be resisted by an impressionable youngster, and many teachers were quite offended by the election of such a peculiar way to sound.
you're not the only one who's into the "r" phoneme. this made my day, truly.
I really like the final bits, without speech (though the talking is the main attraction, of course).
I am still in a rhotic speaking part of the country! We use a retroflex 'r', which was taken to the Americas. Cornwall.
In modern German, "ch" also has an agreement pattern with vowels. After back-vowels, (a,o,u), "ch" will be a sound made in back of the mouth, as you have shown in this video. When it is at the beginning of a syllable or after a front-vowel (e,i,ä,ö,ü) it will be a more fronted consonant (not unlike the sound at the beginning of "human"). Despite this fact, and the fact that we know there was vowel/consonant agreement in other situations in Old English, the "ch" seems to always be rendered as a back-mouth vowel by linguists, even when after an e or an i. As a German speaker, the very rapid glide in tongue-position this requires seems unnatural. I wonder if you have any thing to say about this, Simon?
Recently I have been binge watching the BBC's coverage of the general elections during the late fifties into 1979, and I'd like to point out that the prominent psephologist (his term for an elections analyst) Sir David Butler had a very prominent use of the labiodental approximant.
I'll have to look up what you mean because I don't know, but watching old election shows is one of my hobbies and I always noticed that David Butler exhibited unusual pronunciations of certain words and place names that even other people at the same time didn't use. For example he pronounced the place Southall in west London as "Suth-ell", in the same way that the racecourse in the Nottinghamshire town Southwell is still pronounced today, (although the other pronunciation is usually used when referring to the town by itself). Anyway, sorry to go off topic. That probably doesn't have anything to do with what you were talking about.
@@ajs41 I pronounce Southwell in London as Suth-ell. I thought that was the right way to pronounce it. I'll have to ask a true Londoner how they pronounce it
Doesn't "psephologist" just mean an election analyist? I don't know if other countries have famous psephologists but her in Australia Antony Green, is a national hero in some circles.
One thing that's not mentioned in this video is the absorption of vowels into following /r/s. Most (or at least many) Americans have a lot syllabic /r/s, e.g., in my dialect, "bird" = /brd/, her = /hr/, "work" = /wrk/, "burn" = /brn/ (with a retroflex /r/ in my case), whereas, in Irish English, all of these words would have actual vowels in these words FOLLOWED BY /r/, and there are no syllabic /r/s in their phonology at all (as far as I know, though I know there are a lot of varieties of Irish Englsh). These vowels in Irish English are reduced and have a more limited number of distinctions than they would without the following /r/, but there are still 2 or 3 different possibilities that correspond to the syllabic /r/ in American English.
(My linguistics teacher (from California) didn't personally believe in describing English with a syllabic /r/, but I think he somewhat conceded the point, phonetically at least, when I pointed out that my tongue doesn't even move when I pronounce the word "her". It also doesn't independently move when I pronounce "purr", "burr", "whir" or "fur"/"fir", it doesn't move until after the /r/ in "herd", "word", "work", "bird", "burn", "fern", etc.m ==, and, when I pronounce "sure", it only moves by retracting slightly more than it needs to to stop the frication on the [ʃ].)
Interestingly, the word "wort", as in "liverwort", does have an actual /o/ in it in my dialect, but that's probably just because I assumed it was pronounced the same as "wart", and maybe even learned the word in an English accent.
This is an IPA transcription thing. It is a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/ or a vowel /ɚ/. But you can't transcribe just plain /ɹ/ there, you have to mark it as syllabic at least.
Very Interesting video.And very useful and educative.I am a native Spanish speaker and the “r” sound in english, is the most challenging sound for me.It surprises me , though, why native english speakers didn’t understand me when I was rolling my “r” when I first move to england if this is also a feature in many english dialects.
I never ever in a thousand years expected to hear Limmy's voice in these hallowed halls. My surprise is only exceeded by my approval.
Im trying to make a conlang based on my particular dialect of English which is a blend of Appalachian and midland english, which occurs in a small group of counties in ohio. This video has been very helpful. Thank you
I've not reached the level as a linguist to have a favorite phoneme. But hearing you talk about yours was fascinating.
When I listen to Simon, I think I can understand english because his accent is so clear, and It´s interesting how the "r" pronunciation defines as well the different ways of a dyalect, because the american and canadian "r" pronunciation is far known and very different of brittish or australian "r". As a permanent student of english, my preferences are always going to the UK accents.
I find myself talking about "r" with people all the time. I think it's one of the easiest ways of telling roughly where people are from.
Also, very please about the Limmy references and sneaking in Jackson's iconic intro. Thanks for this video Simon! Such an interesting subject
Everything I’ve wondered about “R” sounds, plus some. Fantastic! Thank you!
Why would I skip forward and miss that fascinating information? 😄Your videos are always educational and usually make me amazed at all I have left to learn.
The Thrilled R in German was a lot more common in the past and southern Dialects. You can listen to it in Swiss German. I am from Southern Brazil and grew up listening to people around me speaking varied Dialects of German. Almost all of them Thrilled their Rs... a good person to is (sadly) Hitler has got that kind of accent being from Austria and Franz Beckenbauer too being from Bavaria. I believe that the Northern R has been replacing other varieties in the Standard german.
when i started working in Bristol a colleague asked to borrow a carrcalayer. after asking them to repeat their request and several moments of bewilderment, i eventually realised they were looking to perform mathematics with my electronic counting device
Thank you for making this wonderful video and for also delving into the evolution of the R sound in German! 😊 Learnt so much today.
I live in Bavaria and everybody around here trills their Rs, including myself.
Very interesting, thanks. I'd always assumed the USA R was more influenced by the Irish version than the British, as it resembles the former more.
Before you mentioned it I was already going to comment that in Dutch we have several interesting pronunciations of the R as well. I moved to Brussels from The South of the Netherlands a few years ago and started to wonder why in Belgium, only the Limburgers seem to speak with a French/German R, whereas in the south of the Netherlands everyone seems to speak with the French/German R.
So I did some research and it seems like the rolling R is the original southern Dutch R, but it largely gor replaced in The Netherlands, but not in Belgium. The only example of souther Dutch in The Netherlands I could find with a rolling R, was in the village Stein, near Maastricht.
I tild my parents, who are both from Maastricht about that and they hadn't been aware.
Recently on my fathers 80th, which we celebrated in Maastricht, I overheard some Limburg sounding people with a rolling R. And thus t was prooved. Sort of. Enough for me. ;)
Cheers!
@@AAA-fh5kd Hi. I'm not entirely sure what you're on about here but I think I get the gist. I've got no horse in the race, being Dutch but you certainly seem to... Nevertheless, that's an interesting observation regarding that non-rhoticity in certain accents in regions with historically high Irish immigration. I'm not an expert of the matter but my first question would be: Are adopting non-rhoticity and an R influenced by the Irish pronunciation, mutually exclusive?
Also, how many Scottish regional accents are non-rhotic? I'm not well versed in the Scottish accents, so I can't think of any.
Cheers.
@@AAA-fh5kd Okay. You're stating a lot of things here and honestly, it's a little hard to follow, partly because you seem to omit a lot of punctuation.
I'm not making one claim or the other, all I said is I'd assumed the USA pronunciation of the letter R resembles the Irish way more than the British.
I will add that there are British regional accents that resemble the USA pronunciation too. I can't point them out, as I'm not an expert in British accents, but I've heard them before. However, I get the sense that you're extremely keen on pointing out the USA R originated from British influence rather than Irish. So much so that it makes one wonder whether you have some sort of British nationalist sentiment behind that.
Like I said, I'm Dutch, I've no horse in the race, nor do I really care. I just find these things interesting and I wonder about the origin of accents a lot.
I've had a little listen at the Brahmin accent, and it does come across as uper class British in origin to me.
Is there anyone else who can chyme in on this?
@@AAA-fh5kd Not entirely true. There are some working class Dublin accents that are traditionally non-rhotic, but these have been becoming weakly rhotic in more recent years.
@@AAA-fh5kd Thanks for clarifying. I was recovering from covid and I had more trouble focussing my eyes on text than normal. That may have contributed to the confusion too. It's all interesting stuff.
Just to let you know. English isn't a British language. It was introduced into the British Isles by the Germanic tribes which later developed into what we know as English today when England & English came into existence in 927AD after the Germanic Kingdoms united under one King. Then the Norman French change English further into the Germanic/Romance language you hear today.
I've heard that the non-rhoticity in England and the non-rhoticity in US East-Coast cities might sort of be one thing - the change happened around the turn of the 19th century, when there was still a lot of trade between England and US ports (despite the high tensions), and at the same time the Eastern inland was still pretty rural and disconnected. It's possible the change spread via sea route to the US, but then didn't spread into the Country. Note, the non-rhoticity of the Planter class (and by extention, Afro-American) came from the Southeast coast as well, while the modern (and somewhat obnoxiously rhotic) Southern accent comes from inland.
There's a few modern southern accents which are still non-rhotic, like those of southern Louisiana.
I always thought a “rolled r” was an uvular trill, not an alveolar trill. just now discovering i can’t do alveolar trills!
Did I miss something? I didn't hear mention of the dialect that pronounces the R as W. I think there's late night show host in England that speaks like this, and I e seen it movies as well.
Think of Elmer Fudd's "Wascally Wabbit"
That Ross person?
@@mrshazukikei yeah Jonathan Ross.
for most of my life, i thought the alveolar trill was a uvular trill. i'm brazilian, so even though people use the alveolar trill here, it's not phonemic, it's an allophone of our hard R (usually something along the lines of a /h/) and sounds very dated. so, as a child, whenever i tried to make that sound, i'd do a uvular trill. i only found out the actual articulation a few years back and it honestly baffles me how almost everyone can do it when it's impossible to me
Could the strange R sound in New Yoik actually be caused by continental Europeans such as italians and Germans trying to avoid the trill that was in their accent in an attempt to make the sound that they heard people who lived there making?
It also depends upon what parts of the UK that the English speakers came from, and when.
I believe that pronuncing r as i comes from Palermo in Sicily. Look up the video titled "Sicilian Language vs Italian vs Spanish vs Portuguese | Can they understand it?" from Ecolinguist to see what I mean. At 00:42 in that video you will hear the speaker pronounce Nord as Noid. This feature could also have come from German speakers, if you type in Furcht in Google Translate and hit the audio button, you will hear that the r is almost disappeared.
There should be evidence of this comparing linguistic evidence to immigrations records. Most Italians didn’t arrive until the late 1800s.
As a Northern Irishman starting out in voiceover, non-rhoticity is the bane of my life when I adopt an RP accent. My native accent has an almost overwhelming rhoticity, so I have to constantly watch it sneaks back in. Linking Rs are a particular difficulty for me as it's the opposite of what I'm trying to do - leave out the R.
The opposite is also true (I suspect the phoneme you declined to say was the one I'm talking about) - Dame Judi Dench got an Oscar nomination playing a granny in Branagh's 'Belfast', but her non-rhoticity constantly betrayed her to the natives. It wasn't very close.
My RP is most like (and influenced by) Partrick Stewart, a Yorkshireman, and thus someone who has suppressed his own rhotic accent. That may be why I have an easier time approximating him.
What about the rolled R that old theatre performers and announcers used? I've heard that was just done to make the speech more intelligible from a distance in the era before electrical amplification.
I remember the first joke that I learned as a child:
Question- What's a pirate's favorite letter?
Answer- Aaarrrrrrr!
Nay! A pirate’s first love will always be the C [sea].
That's so cute!
Was about to post that pirate speech is clearly proper english :D
The old french up to recently has rolled r ; the gutural r is very récent like after the 2sd world war. Still in some french villages some old people roll their r
2:15 - 2:34 That labiodental approximant. I have heard it distinctly in two instances - Terry Jones of Monty Python and Rik Mayall in The Young Ones. Terry's LDA 'r' came off pronounced in some of his characters, but I could it hear it a bit in his natural speaking. It wasn't Mayall's natural speaking, but he laid it on thick in his portrayal of Rick. Thanks for putting this up.
Wow, I am obsessed with this topic
Fascinating!
I appreciate your ability to articulate the various sounds in addition to describing their formation. Even more, your ability to utilize the linguistic tools while explaining the sound changes to a layman is commendable and effective.
Fascinating. I have always been interested in the 'r' and how it is pronounced around the English speaking countries. Thank you
I'm Bristolian, so I REALLY like the "R" sound!
I am glad that you addressed this very important topic, but sad that you did not mention pirates even once.
Honestly, there's never been a Simon Roper video that hasn't fascinated me.
Brilliant content as always. One thing I guess I did want to point out though due to sheer population sizes, the vast majority of native English speakers are still rhotic when you consider the US and Canada (around 300m native speakers combined removing recent immigrants born speaking other languages). I know especially in the US there are non-rhotic regional dialects, but they are not large and as you noted and are actually shrinking. I'm also curious about the current state of 'r' at the start of words in the UK. I only have useless anecdotal evidence, but I swear in many of the British TH-cam channels, the initial 'R' sounds much more like a 'W' in contemporary speech (sorry for my terribly unscientific phonology). I know this is very unscientific, but I'm curious if looking at very modern speech and projecting forward if the 'R' phoneme is going through a similarly radical change in the UK like the "th" phoneme is (which always sounds like 'V' and 'F' to my American ears) for all of those that are not speaking the most precise 'RP'.
The letter r is the most intriguing and diverse one in English and in European languages in general. Possibly, also one of the hardest to pronounce in most of those languages.
Finally someone who is taking the time to debunk the French influence theory!
And then all the extras! Great work! Thanks! 😊
In my area in the Netherlands, we have words that have several r's and each of these r's is pronounced differently. E.g. 'raar' and 'rare' (meaning strange, odd) , which is like old English rare.
If we're thinking in terms of cavemen, I think the "Runge, R" was produced amongst the first sounds - amongst the "ooh", "ooga", "auhm", and the "easier" grunts.
It started getting complex when they started controlling the airflow.
I would imagine that the "French" pronunciation of "R" came before any other pronunciations that require the tip of the tongue.
And the various articulations that utilize the tip of the tongue developed afterwards.
Just a perspective.
I tend to roll my R's but that's mostly because English being my second language, (My first is Czech) although I did learn English very young at about 6 years old I still instinctively pronounce my R's like a eastern European would.
I learn so much from your videos - still working on figuring out just what terms like "alveolar" mean, but I love how you present the various sounds, and hearing how they are mutated across time and space. :-)
Annd, I’ve heard working class Brits put an “N” sound before an “R”. Imagine a guy saying “You grabbed the wrong one, bruv”
This is absolutely fascinating! Thanks for researching it all and making the video. I sometimes wonder how all the variants of the /r/ sound can possibly be allophones, but this video explains how they are actually closer to one another than I realised.
As someone about 50 years your senior who has observed these differences from a very early age, I wish to say that I think you're very nearly always right.
My 'native dialect' is a conserative Canadian one. It is throughly 'rhotic', and I disike 'intrusive r' intensely. But I completely tolerate non-rhotic English with 'linking r', which to me sounds 'posh', as the characteristic speech of royalty, statesmen in my youth, and the great Shakespearian actors Richardson, Olivier, and Gielgud.
In the 16th c. there was a kind of speech (mostly southern English, I believe) in which r was lost before s and other alveolar consonants with no effect on the following consonant. Examples are 'ass' for 'arse' (now almost universal in North America) and 'passel' for 'parcel' (widespread but distinctly rustic). That got me into trouble when I worked on the Records of Early English Drama (REED) Project. Previous in-house editors had treated examples as scribal errors and corrected them in footnotes, but I insisted they were phonetic spellings and needed to be entered in the English Glossary. The General Editor disliked that because (1) it took up a bit more type, (2) it 'showed up' the work of my collagues, and (3) it appeared to be my own discovery, which in her eyes made it suspect. (In fact I distinctly remembered reading an article about it but never managed to chase that down.) She even sic'ed Peter Meredith on me in an effort to change my mind, but I stuck to my guns. That may have been a minor factor in my eventual dismissal.
Hiya Simon, another great vlog, my niece Charlotte cant understand the woman on the pronunciation off Cumbrian 1400-2020, she thinks its another language, it had me in stitches, this is Choppy in Whitehaven, Cumbria, England
Best review of our loverly R ever. Thank you Simon.
One of the most obvious parts of an accent is its level of rhoticity or non-rhoticity. Now, rhoticity isn't really a one or the othuh\other type thing, instead, it's on a scale. For example, the non-rhotic American dialects tend to have rhoticity in what linguists call the "NURSE" set of words (work, girl, heard, surf, etc) and may be rhotic in the "CURE" set of words (cure, immured, surely, etc), even when the accent may be otherwise non-rhotic. Also, the rhoticity can be inconsistent, with someone sometimes dropping post vocalic R, sometimes pronouncing it.
To make things even more confusing, there are a few words where is silent even in completely rhotic speech because its silence in said words has nothing to do with rhoticity
It's a pretty poor scale though, given that it doesn't fit many other variations of "r", such as the trill. A bit too specific.
Just come to think of how it's pronounced in swedish. My mothers family came from south-western sweden where they had a very interesting dialectal peculiarity. Which is that a 'strong' R, in the beginning of a word or in the stressed syllable, is pronounced like a french or german R, but otherwise pronounced with a mild tap which is the most common version in most of sweden. But it also brings up another feature of R in swedish more generally. That in most dialects before certain consonants the R disappears but changes how the consonant is pronounced (and often the vowel before it as well). So the 4 consonants where it does this are D, T, N, S. So in a word like "hård", the R disappears but the D is pronounced slightly differently than otherwise. And before an S it's basically pronounced like sh in english. Also before an L the R usually disappears and is occasionally sounding exactly as it would be pronounced in english with that little hint of an english R.
Then we have the southernmost accents where all R's are pronounced like in your throat, and in Småland they mostly make diphtongs out of and hardly have any consonant there at all, and in swedish-speaking parts of Finland all R's are tapped or trilled. Stockholm also have all kinds of versions of the R-sound and you can often pinpoint which part of Stockholm someone comes from just by how they pronounce (or don't pronounce) this letter. It's a running theme that there usually seems to be 2-3 different variations of the sound in many dialects of swedish. In Öland for example the word "ringmuren", is pronounced so that the first R is a soft tap, like a scottish person would say it, the second is pronounced almost like an american would say it.
This was really interesting to me, I learned English growing up in Texas, and in California (about 1st grade)they made me take speech therapy for the way I pronounced my Rs. Sometimes throughout my life, my Rs have sounded a little off. I also suffer from bruxism that effects my front teeth. I’ve noticed over the years my, I guess accent shift a bit as my right front tooth has changed shape, etc. and Ss and Rs are effected as I talk, and I talk a lot! (Just ask my boss) so I hear myself saying things differently, as my teeth are pretty much constantly changing w the grinding. I think it’s so interesting to here all the different ways to pronounce Rs..! I like the trill, but if I start doing that people will really think I’m eccentric! I took German in hs, and my best friend is Dutch, so this video is particularly interesting to me, to hear the origins of R, and how well you demonstrate the pronunciations.
"Eccentric" doesn't mean "bad", so why not?
The Northumbrian ‘R’ is sometimes referred to as a ‘Percy R’ and is believed to be an adopted feature where an affectation of speech of Harry Hotspur, a Duke of Northumberland was actually copied as mark of admiration. Certainly, it was not universal in Northumbrian speech from the seventies on, people either had it or not.
I have also noticed some occurrences of this in rural accents from counties Waterford and Cork which could be an import from the times of the banishment of border revivers to Ireland in Tudor times along with Northern English surnames eg Cuthbert, Musgrave, Stapleton.