FREE - Accent Softening Exercise: R

The letter R:

This is the sound that you might make when you imitate a grizzly bear – GGRRR – and not the sound your doctor asks you to make when they want to examine your throat – AAHHH.

When does a Standard English speaker use the R sound?

Generally, accents can be grouped into what is called RHOTIC or NON-RHOTIC. A RHOTIC accent will say every /R/ that is written. Speak aloud the following sentence and if you hear and feel yourself saying every /R/ sound, you are a RHOTIC speaker. Start slowly but then repeat it several times at a more conversational speed:

• Rebecca ran quickly through the flowers and around the river to catch Rover, her overactive dog.

If you said MOST of the /R/'s but missed out the /R/’s in ‘flowers’ and at the end of ‘river’ and ‘Rover’, (and possibly even the one at the end of ‘her’) you are a NON-RHOTIC speaker. This is because NON-RHOTIC speakers only say the /R/ sound if it is followed by a vowel sound. Please remember this! So, if you say the words ‘river’ and ‘Rover’ in isolation, you can see that the final /R/’s are followed by nothing, so a NON-RHOTIC speaker wouldn’t say them. Instead, they would use the sound that you hear at the end of the word ‘comma’ or ‘America’. If you look at ‘river’ and ‘Rover’ in the above sentence, then they are both followed by the consonant sounds of their neighbouring words: ‘river to’, ‘Rover her’, so again the /R/’s would not be spoken. Similarly, the /R/ in ‘flowers’ is followed by a consonant sound /S/ not a vowel sound, so a NON-RHOTIC speaker would not say it. Again, they would use the ‘comma’/‘America’ sound between the /W/ and the /S/ 'flowers'. If you spoke the sentence too slowly or were being very careful, you might not have said the /R/ at the end of ‘her’? If you take the word in isolation then you can see that the /R/ finishes the word and would normally not be said, however, in the context of the above sentence it is actually followed by a vowel sound: ‘her overactive’ and the /R/ would then be spoken. This unique situation is called a LINKING /R/ where the /R/ links one word to the next.

So, is a Standard English speaker RHOTIC or NON-RHOTIC?

A Standard English speaker is NON-RHOTIC, so they only say an /R/ if it is followed by a vowel sound. This might not always be a typical written vowel: a, e, i, o, u. If you say the word ‘Harry’ you will notice that the final /Y/ sound is the same as the vowel in the word ‘tea’, so the /Y/ looks like a consonant but sounds like a vowel, so a NON-RHOTIC speaker would say the /R/ in ‘Harry’.

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