There are many articles available on the internet about the so-called ‘intrusive r’, but as a visitor to this blog has written asking me to correct people who “persist in inserting an extra [R] between the [W] and the [I] (of ‘drawing’) making the word into [DRAWRING] ! WRONG !!!!!”, perhaps yet another will not be out of place. I mentioned the word drawer and its confusion with draw in a previous post (here), but now for something longer.

Speakers of the English language can be divided in many ways. One of these is into the two classes of ‘rhotic’ and ‘non-rhotic’.  By this is meant that some varieties of English pronounce all orthographic ‘r’, (the rhotic group), while others do not (the non-rhotic speakers).

Non-rhotic accents occur in most of England, the whole of Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and some parts of the United States, notably New England and the South, although the position in US English is complicated and changing. Scotland, Ireland, Canada and most of the United States are traditionally thought of as being rhotic.

Non-rhoticity in English means that /r/ as a phoneme occurs only when the following sound is a consonant. Every pre-consonantal and pre-final orthographic ‘r’ is dropped. In accents of England, this has been noticed for over 200 years. The consequence of this r-dropping is that words such as idea and near, saw and sore, farm and calm now rhyme (/aɪˈdɪə/~/nɪə/, /sɔː/~/sɔː/,  /fɑːm/~/kɑːm/). The majority of words ending in these vowel sounds (/ə, ɔː, ɑː/) similarly have no following orthographic ‘r’, but a minority do end in a written ‘r’. When a word such as near or sore is followed by another word, or a suffix, that begins with a vowel, the orthographic ‘r’ is pronounced, as it would be if the ‘r’ occurred at the beginning of a word, immediately before a vowel. So we get the phrase near and far /ˈnɪər ən ˈfɑː/, where the first orthographic ‘r’ is pronounced, or reversing the words: /ˈfɑːr ən ˈnɪə/. By analogy with these words, the rhyming words which happen not to end in ‘r’, acquire an /r/ sound in the same situations. Hence, the idea of … becomes /ðɪ ˈaɪdɪər əv …/ and drawing becomes /ˈdrɔːrɪŋ/.

My complainant says that “I consider it to be ignorance of the learning of pronunciation.” I suspect that he, like every other native speaker of English, learned his pronunciation from the people around him. As non-rhotics have been around for at least two hundred years, the current perpetrators of this horror (in his view) must have learned their errors from their parents, siblings and friends, just as he has learned his (presumably) rhotic ways from his.

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