![]() You mean where did I park the car? In the garage.Ĭlick here for more videos about British and American English. When R is at the end of words, there’s not much rounding in British or American. There’s less rounding of the lips in British English. In American English the lips round a little when R is at the start of a word. Your tongue can curl up and get close, but it must not touch. The most common mistake my students make is they let the tip of their tongue touch the top of their mouth. The sides of your tongue might touch the inside of your teeth at the back. For an R you need to pull it in and back so it gets fatter and thicker. You can push it out and make it pointy, or you can pull it in. The first thing to understand is your tongue is a very flexible instrument. We should talk about that because the R sound is one of the most difficult English sounds for my students to make. Ha! So if you want to sound American, make sure you pronounce your R sounds. So I concentrated very hard and I said Rrrefrridgeratorrrs, and it put me straight through. And it said ‘What department do you want?’ so I said ‘fridges’ and it said, ‘We don’t recognize that request’. We needed to buy a fridge so called a department store and it had an automated voice recognition system, so I was talking to a machine not a human being. Yes, well I want to be sure the taxi driver knows where to take me. So if I get in a taxi, I try to copy him and I say Arrrch Street. Like, we live on a street called Arch Street. We live in the US and when I speak, people normally understand me just fine, but sometimes I have to change my R sounds to try to sound American. The R sound is one of the big differences in our accents. ![]() Yes, but my feeling is, we do pronounce it. So in British English, it sounds like you don’t pronounce the r sound in the middle and at the end of words? Let’s see what happens when the R is at the end of the word now. Let’s have some examples.ĭid you hear the difference? Jay’s R sounds were stronger. But if the R sound is followed by a consonant, or if it’s at the end of a word, I’ll say it VERY gently. I say them clearly when they come in front of a vowel, much like Jay. Now, this doesn’t mean I never pronounce r sounds. So my accent is rhotic, and Vicki’s is non-rhotic. For example, Scotland and Ireland and in the south west of England tooĪnd there are parts of the US where they say the R sound like Vicki, like New England and parts of the south.īut generally speaking, accents in the UK are non-rhotic and accents in the US are rhotic. There are parts of the UK where people have rhotic accents like Jay. There’s a lot of regional variation though. Rhotic is when people pronounce the R sounds strongly, like Jay.Īnd in non-rhotic accents like mine, we sometimes drop the R sound or say it very weakly. Linguists sometimes divide accents and dialects into 2 types: rhotic and non-rhotic accents. So listen to how Jay and I say the words.ĭid you hear the difference at the end of the words? Jay pronounced the r sound more strongly. It’s one of the big differences in our accents. Vicki’s British and I’m American, so we can do this. Also, maybe include ‘air’ in that video too. They said ‘Can you do a pronunciation video on the British and American pronunciations of ‘ear’. We received a request from someone called S. Youre capturing it with two words Reg and Ex. The R sound in British and American English 1) RegEx > /.ks/ > Youre new to Regular Expression - the word. Is it Day or Die (I think if you're from the West Coast it's Day, if you're from the East Coast it's Die.Click here for some more pronunciation lessons.Ĭlick here for more videos about British and American English. Is it Jean (as in the girl's name) OR Jhon (as in a French man's name) Is it Baw-tee-air OR Bow-tee-air (as in 'take a bow') I apologize for the triviality of this post. We have servicemen and women dying overseas, hurricanes, tsunamis, and terrorists and all I can think about is how to correctly pronounce some magician's names. I sometimes have a tendency to ask unimportant questions.
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