The History of the 'R' Sound in English

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[bixylim]

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.

[diogofelss]

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.

[charlesvanderhoog]

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.

[esterhammerfic]

Me, watching with headphones on a train:
🗣️🤳 "R...r... rr... rr...."

[pabloalvez]

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 👍💐🙏🌹

[ralphmanders]

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).

[edmilner]

Totally unrelated to linguistics but the plant outside your kitchen window is called Green Alkanet(Pentaglottis sempervirens).

[neilog]

Seriously, you should narrate bedtimes stories to children. I can't believe listening to YouTubers about linguistics can be this calming.

[Rachel-rsjn]

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").

[jackdubz]

As a Scot, I must admit that I love the sound of letter "R".

[phonaesthem]

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.

[DSteinman]

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

[VRSVLVS]

Fun fact: in Dutch, the trilled "R" is considered the common everyday variant, while the fricative version is considered the posh variant.

[msJill]

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.

[johnweiner]

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.

[grievousangelic]

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!

[jangelbrich]

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.

[teamcrumb]

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

[a_diamond]

Can we take a moment to appreciate the wholesome comment section of this man's videos?
Awesome to see 😊❤️

[siarhian]

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