Is rhotic or non-rhotic more common?
Two question;
Among English speakers, do you think non-rhotic or non rhotic is more common? I thought rhotic would be a given, but when you consider some other countries with people with English as their main language (say Africa) it's closer than you think.
The US has about 290 million people, but I'm guessing at least 50-60 million of them speak non-rhotic English: these would include New Yorkers, many Southerners, Blacks and ex-pats from countries like Britain.
Outside the US, rhotic is found in W.England, Scotland, Ireland, the West Indies and the Phillipines. Probably a world total of about 300 million rhotic speakers.
On the other hand, most of the UK (I'm guessing 35 million is rhotic), added to the 60 million in the US, A good 17 million in Australia, that's over 100 million...I guess even with India and Africa it would probably still be below 200 million.
So much for that, I just needed to very roughly calculate in my head. Probably way off. I hear original Old English was rhotic, do you think that makes it more correct?
Also, what about other languages. Is rhoticism more common than not?
Thanks
Non-Rhotacism is a pretty random thing. I mean, why drop the r in particular? I'd guess it's only common in Germanic languages.
Almost all German dialects are non-rhotic. My dialect even has mergers before r comparable to mergers in English dialects (mary-marry-merry, hoarse-horse, pour-poor, fern-fir-fur). Probably also a Germanic languages only thing.
<<The US has about 290 million people, but I'm guessing at least 50-60 million of them speak non-rhotic English: these would include New Yorkers, many Southerners, Blacks and ex-pats from countries like Britain.>>
The US actually has about 306 million people, as of 2009. As for the non-rhotic population, let's look at some demographic figures (mostly from 2007 to 2008):
New York metropolitan area: 18.8 million people
Massachusetts: 6.5 million people
Rhode Island: 1.1 million people
Maine: 1.3 million people
Southerners: about 110 million
African Americans: about 39 million, of whom maybe 5 million live in the non-rhotic northeast and maybe 15 million live in the South
It's hard to figure out how many of each group are non-rhotic, though. Let's say that it's 55% of people in the traditionally non-rhotic Northeastern regions, 60% of African Americans and 5% of white Southerners: (28 * .55) + (95 * .05) + (39 * .60) = 43.55, so about 45 million non-rhotic Americans based on that estimate.
Of course, about 18% of Americans do not use English at home, so if that effected the two camps equally, we would have about 36 million non-rhotics and 210 million rhotics based on 2007 or 2008 estimates.
<<Outside the US, rhotic is found in W.England, Scotland, Ireland, the West Indies and the Phillipines. Probably a world total of about 300 million rhotic speakers.>>
Are we counting native English speakers, or just any English speakers? I think most of the population of the former British West Indies would speak Creole in their daily lives. As for the Philippines, I don't think that many Filipinos use English as their daily language.
Scotland has 5.1 million people, Ireland has 6.0, and South West England has 4.9 million. If we assume that Scotland and Ireland are 80% rhotic, and SW England is 20%, then we get about 12 million rhotics in Britain and Ireland. (Leaving us 53 million others, of whom maybe 10% don't use English as their home language, so about 48 million non-rhotics.)
Canada has 33.6 million people, of whom English is the home language of 67%: that's about 22.5 million, all rhotic.
Australia and New Zealand should give us about 24 million English speakers, nearly all non- rhotic. South Africa adds about 3.5 million native English speakers to the non-rhotic camp.
So based on my extremely crude calculations, we have about 110 million non-rhotics and about 245 rhotics.
>>Non-Rhotacism is a pretty random thing. I mean, why drop the r in particular? I'd guess it's only common in Germanic languages.
Almost all German dialects are non-rhotic. My dialect even has mergers before r comparable to mergers in English dialects (mary-marry-merry, hoarse-horse, pour-poor, fern-fir-fur). Probably also a Germanic languages only thing.<<
Also note that Danish is non-rhotic as well, for the record.
A majority of Southern American speakers are rhotic...
Lots of people in the NY metropolitan area are rhotic, too -- especially in the northern suburbs. In fact, there aren't that many non-rhotic folks at up in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Fairfield, Orange, Dutchess, etc.
The situation here in Massachusetts is quite varied. Urbanites tend to be non-rhotic, whereas suburbanites are more likely to be rhotic. It also correlates somewhat with longitude (with few non-rhotic people in the western part of the state) and with age (with older people tending to have a more conservative dialect, and younger people tending to have more General American influence).
A majority of Southern American speakers are rhotic...(Skippy)
I second that sentiment. Non-rhoticism in the South is disappearing rapidly, except among the African-American population, which speaks a different dialect anyway.
Canada, too, is an English-speaking country!!!
And Anglo Canadians are mostly rhotic!!
Canadian English is simply a dialect of North American English. Actually less than that since it overlaps so much with certain dialects in the US, particularily in the North Central and West
Interesting. My speech is typically rhotic, however there are exceptions:
"temperature" - [tImpIt_Sr\=]
"surprise" - [s@praIz]
"caterpillar" - [k{4@pI5r\=]
"comforter" = [kVmfI4r\=]
"particular" = [p@tIkjulr\=]
Larry: Your speech doesn't sound very remarkable for American English. It's very common for rhotic Americans to have certain lexical-specific instances where an /r/ is dropped. I'm rhotic, and for those I have:
temperature - [ˈtʰɛmpɹətʃɚ]
surprise - [səˈpʰɹaez]
caterpillar - [ˈkʰæɾəˌpʰɪlɚ]
comforter - [ˈkʰʌmfəɾɚ]
particular - [pəˈtʰɪkjəlɚ]
Hmm. Interesting. What about these?
thermometer - [T@mAmI4@`]
governor - [gVvnr\=]
rural - [r\U5=]
Those are my pronunciations.
I have:
thermometer - [θəˈmɒ:məɾɚ]
governor - [ˈgʌvn=ɚ]
rural - [ˈɹʊɚɫ̩=]
̩
My textbook says below:
Dissimilation is a process by which neighboring sounds become less like one another. A frequent example in present-day Standard English is the omission of two [r] sounds from words like "caterpillar, Canterbury, reservoir, terrestrial, southerner, barbiturate, governor and surprised."