R-less vowels

R-less vowels.

At this stage, considering the level of pronunciation I want to teach, readers have to be able to understand written english. When I start with basic diphthongs we will go back to spanish.

Because of the evolution of english, as it has a long history and spread over the world, we are able to divide the varieties of english into two basic types of accents, the rhotic and the non-rhotic accents. Of course there are more categories but today we will be focusing on this concept of rhoticity.

This word comes from the Greek Ρρ (Rho) which is the letter "R" in the greek alphabet.

So an accent that is considered non-rhotic in english is an accent in which the /ɹ/ sound is not pronounced unless its followed by a vowel sound.

For example in England:

"Car" by itself would be pronounced as /kɑː/

Whereas "My car is" would be pronounced as /mɑɪ kɑːɹ ɪz/

So the english accent is non-rhotic, but the american on the other hand is a perfect example of rhotic accent:

In american english car would be pronounced as /kɑɹ/ anyway.

And "my car is" would be /mɑɪ kɑɹ ɪz/.

Now thequestion is what happens with words like nurse, sport, air, here, and tour?

if there is no R sound what do we do? The answer is we replace them with vowels.

And this vowels are called R-less vowels for obvious reasons.

The following days we will be discussing R-less vowels and matters of rhoticity and non rhoticity.

Now I will finish with some extra-information:

Some countries with non-rhotic accents:

England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Jamaica.

In general Caribbean english, African english, african american vernacular english, Indian English and traditionally English as a second language in Hong Kong.

Countries with rhotic accents:

United States, Canada, Scotland, Ireland.

Also the south of New Zealand and commonly English as a second language in the world.