>Most English people don't pronounce the rhotic "r", with the main exception being the West Country. It's still widely pronounced in Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Wales.
Its fascinating listening to Original Pronunciation Shakespeare and hearing how utterly rhotic it is, indicating that Americans and British use to sound alike before diverging
> The earliest traces of a loss of /r/ in English appear in the early 15th century and occur before coronal consonants, especially /s/, giving modern ass 'buttocks' (Old English ears, Middle English ers or ars), and bass (fish) (OE bærs, ME bars). A second phase of the loss of /r/ began during the 15th century and was characterized by sporadic and lexically variable deletion, such as monyng 'morning' and cadenall 'cardinal'. Those spellings without /r/ appeared throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but they were uncommon and were restricted to private documents, especially those written by women. No English authorities described loss of /r/ in the standard language before the mid-18th century, and many did not fully accept it until the 1790s.
This would suggest that it was on the rise during Shakespeare's time.
> Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home.
> It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.
> That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated.
> One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”
My favorite parts about the Original Pronunciation reconstructions of Shakespeare are how many lost puns keep getting discovered, even in the most serious plays, because most of them are quite ribald and directly tosses to the groundlings. It's a fun reminder that Shakespeare was dirtier than people today like to think and that he was never writing strictly for the upper crust and high society (like a lot of today's Shakespeare Companies seem intended for).
Its fascinating listening to Original Pronunciation Shakespeare and hearing how utterly rhotic it is, indicating that Americans and British use to sound alike before diverging