Non-rhotic accents include most varieties of British English, Welsh English, New Zealand English, Australian English, South African English, Trinidadian and Tobagonian English, Standard Malaysian English and Singaporean English.
In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the /r/ sound, pronouncing them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples", most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the /r/ in that position (the linking R), since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
It's actually canon in the Batman comics that Alfred is good at doing different accents, because of his actor's training.
Oh, cool! This also means we have no idea where he’s from unless he mentions it*, as the cut-glass RP accent that I always read his words in the comic in (more or less the one he has in the animated series) was definitely trained into him at drama school if not before.
(Language and culture nerd time)
Nowadays, drama schools teach you to do accents but don’t seek to remove your own accent. In Alfred’s day, nearly every drama school would have also sought to replace your standard accent with RP, aka ‘BBC English’, as this would have been very important for getting work. Depending on his socioeconomic background, his parents might also have tried to get him to talk ‘properly’ regardless of where he grew up - there is a lot of accent snobbery about in the UK, but for his generation it was intense and led to relative homogeneity of accent in many people who grew up middle-class or above.
Today this is a thing but less so, as fewer people actively seek to prevent their children speaking with the regional accent of the area they grew up in. But, in my generation, people whose families are solidly middle class or higher still have much softer regional accents, because their parents at home probably speak more or less RP. (Also because their parents are less likely to be from the place they live in, so even if the home accent isn’t RP it’s still not the local regional accent, and because they’re more likely to spend time with RP speakers and/or people without the local accent, at non-state school, summer programs, relatives, etc, and because the ‘highbrow’ media they’re more likely to grow up around is still more likely to contain a lot of RP voices than more ‘lowbrow’ entertainment.)
* I have a vague recollection of Alfred saying he’s from London in a comic, but I don’t understand DC continuity or remember what comic it was, so no idea if it’s canonical. Also ‘from London’ could imply a range of different accents for a young Alfred depending on area and class.
EDIT to add personal anecdote: I am, by background, middle class, and grew up in Yorkshire, and have the accent that implies - what actors might refer to as ‘Soft Northern’. (So soft that a best guess for where in the North would be no more specific than ‘Yorkshire or Lancashire, not Liverpool’. Strong Northern accents can generally be placed to the town/village, or if a big city, which part of the city.)
In my case, my mum is the ‘grew up middle class and thus learned to speak RP’ kind of middle class parent, while my dad is the ‘from somewhere else so not reinforcing the local accent’ type. He’s actually a class mobility success story, a high-ranking academic type from a council estate in Manchester, and while he’s also more Soft Northern these days from years of living in different places and working with RP speakers, among his work peer group it is hugely noticeable that almost everyone else speaks RP, which I think is a good indication of what things are like in that generation. I’ve been to work dos with him and I think foreign accents belonging to people who speak English as a second language are actually more common, among our senior academics, than regional British accents.
Dialect levelling is a form of standardisation whereby local variations of speech lose their distinctive, regional features in favour of a more urban or mainstream dialect. This means that the speech forms of different parts of the country are becoming more similar over time and this results in a reduction of language diversity. There are several factors involved in dialect levelling:
Geographical mobility results in greater dialect contact between commuters.
Social mobility and consequent breakdown of tight knit working class communities.
Increased interaction with people of other speech varieties.
Children are less likely to adopt their parents’ pronunciation as they come under peer pressure to conform to the linguistic norm of the group. Adolescents take on a vital role in language change.
Economic change lead to loss of rural employment and construction of suburbs and new towns.
World Wars meant a change in roles within society especially WWII when women went out to work and soldiers mixed with a wide range of geographical and social backgrounds which may never have previously clashed.
Traditional Dialect Features:
North/Midlands - ‘tha’ for ‘you’, ‘hissen’ for ‘himself’, ‘I is’ or ‘I are’ for ‘I am’, ‘reet’ for ‘right’
Southwest - ‘her’ for ‘she’, ‘I be’ for ‘I am’, 'umman’ for ‘woman’
Modern Dialect Features:
Multiple negation ‘I don’t want none’
Use of ‘ain’t’ for negative auxiliaries
Use of ‘them’ as a demonstrative adjective ‘Look at them big spiders’
Use of glottal stops for /t/ at the end and in middle of words ‘bu/?/er’ ‘le/?/ me’
Replacement of /th/ sounds by /f/ or /v/ so ‘thin’ becomes ‘fin’ and ‘brother’ becomes ‘bruvver’
Order of Spread of Levelling
London and surrounding area
Southeast
Central England – Midlands, East Anglia
Northern England
Northeast England and Scotland
The outcome of levelling is a convergence of accents and dialects towards each other. In some cases, this leads to southern features being adopted in the whole country contributing to the spread of Estuary English as a nationwide dialect.
Kerswill investigated the changes in dialect in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull by interviewing local residents of different ages and studying their pronunciation of certain speech sounds. He generally used children of the ages 4, 8 and 12 (equally divided by sex) and one caregiver, usually the mother.
The recordings were from either specific tasks given to the children such as quizzes or spot the difference games or spontaneous speech obtained by interviews or playground recordings. The children’s caregivers were also interviewed.
Milton Keynes and Reading are both viewed as towns where social and geographical mobility is high as there are plenty of newcomers from all social classes expanding the economy of the areas. However, as Reading is a more established town the population is more stable and local they do not rely on commuters as much.
Hull is geographically more isolated and more economically depressed than the other two towns; cut off from the south by the River Humber and remote from other large metropolises, the town is less attractive to commuters. Social networks are closed as the city is largely working class while surrounding villages are middle class so working/middle class children attend different schools and teenagers living on the estate studied were often third generation locals.
Milton Keynes:
Older residents used vowel sounds typical of the traditional, local accent, newcomers (e.g. parents) spoke with a variety of regional accents, while children spoke like their parents/carers for the first 4 years ( school age – one child sounded Scottish at 4 yrs but had changed to local accent by 5 ½ yrs. before changing to a new Milton Keynes accent) which had developed into Estuary English (watered down cockney with some vowels closer to received pronunciation) and were typical of south-eastern speech.
Reading:
Gradual change as children were influenced by their local born-parents and grandparents. Some change was apparent with older residents pronouncing the post- vowel /r/ sound in ‘start’ and ‘nurse’ and young speakers replacing /t/ with a glottal stop /?/.
Hull:
Young speakers retained the northern accent of their older relatives, notable in vowel sounds such as /u/ in ‘but’. They differed again in the use of glottalling and /th/ fronting in words like ‘think’ and ‘brother’.
North/South Levelling:
Kerswill identified a gradual move among adolescent, Southern speakers towards the more standardised, less localised variations of speech. However, in Hull, the closed social networks encourage the continuation of traditional pronunciations, for example, dropping the /h/ was widespread in both old and young residents of Hull but far less so in Reading and Milton Keynes.
He suggests an economic factor – the prosperity of southern towns makes social mobility and achievable goal for young people, however, the high levels of unemployment in northern towns such as Hull makes children unconvinced of the value of education as a passport to social mobility and therefore reject the pressure from authoritarian systems such as the educational one to modify their accents. Why the /th/ fronting and glottalling in Hull then, as this is common in Reading and Milton Keynes as well.
Kerswill says that these linguistic variations are associated with youth culture rather than social class as they are spread though the media and celebrity culture popular with adolescents. Hull teenagers can signify their allegiance to their region and class by maintaining the traditional northern accent as well as identifying themselves with their peer group by adopting new phonemes popular with youth culture which may still be working class but not traditionally northern.
As I strolled into the kitchen, slung my school bag down and began to make a cup of tea, my father immediately stopped what he was doing, looked up, and raised his (not inconsiderable) eyebrows.
You Say Potato - A Book About Accents
Ben Crystal and David Crystal
This is the second paragraph. I think I'm going to adore this book.
In honour of my latest project for college... a little of Die Antwoord, which is a little more on the Afrikaans side of the South African accent for my project. But its getting me in the mood. These guys make me laugh a lot; I'm told by my South African classmate that they are basically taking the piss, but this is a great little snippet of them just chatting.
