In the 10 minutes I could bear to watch Sunday’s Democratic debate, I was struck by Bernie Sanders’ speech – namely, his accent. Apart from his distinct pronunciation of a few vowels and his intonational and rhythmic patterns typical to New York English, Sanders’ speech mostly perked up my ears because of one feature: its lack of the sound /r/.
Granted, this is somewhat of an over-generalization, because there is no English accent in which the /r/ sound is completely absent. Rather, in some accents, /r/ is not pronounced when it follows a vowel and forms the final part of a syllable. Hence, /r/ sounds that start a syllable and precede a vowel are always pronounced.
In linguistic terminology, /r/-type sounds are called rhotics and generally involve a fairly complicated articulation, which is why children struggle to acquire these sounds and generally master them last. The term “rhotic” is also of utmost importance to the classification of accents in English because it provides a crucial point of division.
Arguably one of the greatest divisions in English is between rhotic and non-rhotic accents, which is to say our speech and accents are immediately distinguishable based on the pronunciation, or lack thereof, of /r/-like sounds. This is why, to my ears, Bernie Sanders’ non-rhotic accent sounds so foreign and so marked. If we think in terms of English accents throughout the world, there is great disparity in /r/ pronunciation. The English accents of England, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and some coastal portions of America’s east coast are overwhelmingly non-rhotic, whereas the accents of Canada, India, Scotland, Ireland and the rest of the U.S. are generally rhotic. In accents that are non-rhotic, troubles generally arise because of so-called “mergers,” in which two separate words become homophones. This also serves as a test for the status of your accent.
But why does this occur? And furthermore, how could it be so randomly spread throughout the world?
Getting to the history of this sound, there was once a period in which every English speaker pronounced /r/ sounds in every word, no matter their position within a syllable. However, in the later parts of the 18th century, English underwent a transition: Some speakers started putting more emphasis on vowels before /r/ and “sinking” the /r/ sounds themselves. These pronunciations were originally associated with lower, working-class identities, but — likely per rapid urbanization — the English of major cities in England was quickly transformed, and the vast majority of accents in England became non-rhotic.
Scotland and Ireland never underwent this transition, which explains the pronunciation of /r/ in their accents. However, areas of the world that endured sustained contact with England — such as relevant parts of Africa, Australia and the Caribbean — inherited /r/ drop and have maintained it up to the present.
Returning to the original accent in question — that of New York: What accounts for the lack of /r/, its most famous feature? Historical linguists posit that this pronunciation derives from the city’s upper class imitating the prestigious accents of London. To vastly oversimplify the phenomenon, this pronunciation caught on and became the standard in the city.
To bring things full circle, sociolinguistic studies conducted in the second half of the 20th century revealed that the general public in New York perceived the complete drop of /r/ as a marker of the lowest social classes, and many natives consciously pronounced /r/ sounds so as not to appear lower-class. So we can glimpse, with a little humor and irony, how in just the span of a few centuries the absence of /r/ sounds has been considered a marker of the working-class, then prestigious enough to merit imitation, then back to its original lowly status. Say this without an /r/: “poor ‘r.’”
This all goes to show that the speech sounds of any language have to be analyzed and understood in the context of power and prestige at specific points in history, as well as the collision of fate and phonetics. This is all to say that I’m feeling the Bern — pronounced “bun.”
Jordan MacKenzie is a second-year UF linguistics master’s student. His column appears on Wednesdays.
