Southwestern phonology: consonants

Rhoticity: Most Southwestern accents preserve post-vocalic /r/, which is frequently retroflex in quality (i.e. ). Wells (1982: 342), quoting LAE results, reports that the iso-gloss separating retroflex from post-alveolar /r/ runs from Bristol to Portsmouth. The retroflex areas are thus Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Full rhoticity occurs in a wide range of social and local accents ranging from the working to the middle class and from rural to urban accents. According to Wells (1982: 341), rhoticity can be found in Bristol, Exeter and (to a lesser extent) in Southampton, but not in Plymouth and Bournemouth.

The exact workings of rhoticity in the Southwest of England are complex and not yet fully understood. According to Wells (1982: 342), rhoticity in the Southwest means R coloring of the preceding vowel. In words of the lexical sets NURSE and lettER, the entire vowel receives R coloring, but for words of the START, NORTH, FORCE, NEAR, SQUARE and CURE sets, it is either the whole vowel or just the endpoint of the diphthong/triphthong which receives R coloring. As with L vocalization, R coloring affects the phonetic quality of the preceding vowel and has led to the rise of new monophthongs and diphthongs. These processes and the theoretical problems that they pose are discussed in Wells (1982: 342–343).

Southwestern middle-class speakers sometimes have a pronunciation where post-vocalic /r/ is not phonetically realized but the effects of rhoticity are still preserved. These speakers have, for instance, a centring diphthong in START words, [staət], but not in words such as spa, [spa: ~ spa:] (Wells 1982: 343).

Hyper-rhoticity can also occur, especially in commA words, which then end in /r/. It can also be sporadically heard in items such as khaki  for which, presumably, Southwestern speakers have mistakenly reconstructed a post-vocalic /r/ on the basis of productions they have heard produced by speakers of non-rhotic accents such as RP. Wakelin (1986: 31) lists path, nought, idea, yellow and window as items recorded with hyper-rhotic pronunciations, and also cites post-vocalic /r/ in words in which metathesis may take place (e.g. ‘purty’ for pretty, ‘gurt’ for great, etc.).