Dropping R’s and Shifting Vowels
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, 07-16-2015 at 09:42 AM (3403 Views)
Some People Do Drop Their R’s
It has been said many times that New Englanders drop their R’s, but it is not true. I knew a little about linguistics, but not all that much, and even my maternal unit, who was a fairly good linguist opined that New England accents dropped R’s. Who was I to disagree?
So there I was in Lebanon, New Hampshire working with a guy from South Carolina, a guy from West Virginia, and the regional manager was from Maine. The South Carolinian had a broad drawl, and he slid all his vowels back a bit. It just happened that there was someone we worked with who was from an old Pilgrim family in Southeastern Massachusetts, and he spoke with an accent that I’d never run into before. Well, I’d run into less extreme examples, but this guy dropped his r’s. I mean there was no r sound in many places where I expected one. One word that I especially remember was “makket”, which was “market” without the R. The South Carolinian and West Virginian claimed not to notice any difference between the way that I spoke and the way that guy spoke, but it was a huge difference to me and to the guy from Maine, because both of us spoke the general New England speech.
I tried to pin down the difference in the South Carolinian’s speech in my non-expert fashion, but I didn’t until one day he wanted to amuse himself with the difference between his speech and the English language. He asked me to say “barbed wire”, which I did, and when he again tried to say “barbed wire” in his distorted version of English I realized that he had change the vowels and said “bourb wore”. He and I were using R’s the same way, but we had big differences in vowels.
I spent a few days thinking about other examples where different vowels sounds had given someone the false impression that a speaker of proper English had dropped a R. One example was from an anecdote my mother had told me about someone mispronouncing “pears” as “purrs”. I mentioned my observation about the vowel sounds, and she quickly understood what I meant and thought of a few similar items.
I thought to write about this after reading a Facebook thing by a native of the Boston area who lives elsewhere but who is proud of her speech. Unfortunately, she falsely claimed to say "watah" for "water" and "pahlah" for parlor, and maybe a few others. That was because she didn't realize that her pronunciation is quite correct, and there are other people with trouble saying "water" instead of whatever they mispronounce water into.
As someone who speaks proper and correct English I have little trouble understanding most of the odd accents that are out there. But the speakers of those odd things sometimes have trouble understanding the correct language. I remember a fellow I knew in college who claimed that he could only understand about 85% of my speech. I responded that I that was odd, because I had no trouble understanding him, even though he mispronounced many words. He was from Indiana, so what can we expect?
As a general matter it may be a good idea to ignore small differences in accents and save the complaints for people in Central India who would rather you would think they were in Texas, even though no one in Texas talks like that.