Rhotic variation in Lancashire

Event details

Abstract:

Rhoticity, the presence or absence of non-prevocalic /r/ in words like star or heart, is typically associated with the accents of Scotland, Ireland, and North America, but  less frequently with England.  Whilst most of England became non-rhotic following an 18th-century sound change, small pockets of rhoticity remain.  One such area is Blackburn, Lancashire, North-West England described as “an island of rhoticity” by Britain (2002). Given the highly stigmatised nature of rhoticity in England (Foulkes & Docherty 2007), its rapid loss has been widely predicted (Trudgill 2000). Despite these predictions, rhoticity loss in England remains unexamined in detail. This study provides the first instrumental investigation of the phonetic and phonological status of /r/ in England, with a focus on the Blackburn dialect.

This is a crucial moment to capture /r/ in Blackburn while it is still present but undergoing attrition: failing to do so risks missing the opportunity to document an ongoing sound change in progress. To this end, we analyse data from two corpora: a sociolinguistic corpus (28 sociolinguistic interviews; 14f, 14m; age 17–81; supplemented with wordlists and minimal pair tests) and an ultrasound tongue imaging corpus (28 ultrasound recordings; 14f, 14m, age 18–72; Tongue spline and auditory analyses across 10 prosodic contexts and three vowel environments).

We argue that /r/-loss is not typically a simple phonological deletion but a process mediated by phonetic gradience, preceding categorical absence.  While intrusive /r/ and hyper-rhoticity are virtually absent, style-shifting and minimal pair judgements indicate that the feature is still socially and phonologically robust in the community.  By demonstrating that even speakers with very low rates of rhoticity (<20%) remain phonologically rhotic, it is argued that gradient phonetic reduction does not equate to categorical phonological loss, but may initiate a path toward categorical loss over generations. The rarity of intrusive and hyper-rhoticity further suggests the relative stability of rhoticity in the speech community.  Blackburn’s /r/-loss exemplifies how gradual phonetic attrition can precede categorical reanalysis, underscoring the role of gestural weakening as an intermediate phonetic stage in sound change. This work contributes to broader debates on the phonetics–phonology interface, highlighting the importance of articulatory evidence as a piece in the puzzle in helping to potentially diagnose phonological representation.