55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth that’s practically a vowel. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, technically known as rhotics, including English r, French r, Spanish r and rr, and more. We also talk about how the presence or absence of R is a feature that distinguishes certain accents: think Canadian vs Australian English, northern vs southern varieties of English in the UK and US, and northern vs southern varieties of Mandarin. Announcements: We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently organized online linguistics events for the week of April 24 to May 2. See the LingFest website for details on other events. https://lingcomm.org/lingfest/ The week before LingFest is LingComm21, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication. LingComm21 is a small, highly interactive, virtual conference that brings together lingcommers from a variety of levels and backgrounds, including linguists communicating with public audiences and communicators with a “beat” related to language. Find out more about LingComm21. https://lingcomm.org/conference/ This month’s bonus episode is about talking to babies and small children! We talk about how the way babies are addressed differs across cultures, how people sometimes alter their speech subtly for babies even when they think they don't, and how infant-directed speech differs from similar genres like pet-directed speech. Join us on Patreon to get access to this, as well as 49 other bonus episodes - as well as a ticket for you and a friend to our upcoming liveshow! https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/648571714904670208/lingthusiasm-episode-55-r-and-r-like-sounds

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to L'Enthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:21.3	I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:22.4	And I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:23.6	And today we're getting enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, also known as ROTicity.
0:28.6	But first, we have a live show.
0:30.3	It's happening in a very few days, late April 2021, if you're listening to this from the future.
0:35.7	And you can get access to it by becoming
0:38.3	a patron, or if you are already a patron, you will have access to it already. And we will send
0:42.3	you a link to the live stream video when it goes up. If you've missed the live stream,
0:46.1	you can catch it as a bonus-ling-thusiasm episode, along with 49 other bonuses, including
0:52.3	our most recent one on Speaking to Kids and Pets.
1:05.0	It was really good that it was my turn to say what this episode was about, because if you said the topic R and R like sounds,
1:13.1	Lauren, I feel like you might say it a little bit differently. I don't know what's wrong with
1:16.5	talking about R like sounds. Ar like sounds is a vowel.
1:23.4	That is definitely convenient that you were the person to introduce this topic because roticity and this ar-ness is something I can do and I can definitely do it at the start of words like red or rice, but it's a sound that is missing from the ends of words for me.
1:42.7	And so it definitely is easier to hear exactly what we're talking
1:46.8	about with roticity. I can do it at the start. But when I'm talking about R, I really have to
1:53.3	really have to work it to articulate that.
1:56.1	Welcome to International Talk like a Pirate Day. Lauren R is this whole episode. I get a bit over-enthusiastic
2:02.8	with putting it in there for sure. But the nice thing is, is because this feature of English accents,
2:09.7	where some of them do pronounce the R's after the vowels and some of them don't, is a feature of
2:13.6	English accents that is one of the sort of big accent splits that we have in English.
	...

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