Brief History of Rhoticitiy in General American English
#+date
Rhoticity, or the articulation of the r phoneme, has become a key feature of distinguishing General American English from other forms of English language.
The r phoneme is present in Proto-Indo-European and continued throughProto-Germanic. Then, it was likely a trill or tap, produced apically (with the tip of the tongue), and used in onset and coda positions, i.e. brōþēr, bearn.
Old English (c. 500ce to 1100ce) maintained full rhoticity, but is indicated to halve evolved into an alveolar tap or trill.
Middle English (c. 1100ce to 1500ce) began to experience rhotic lenition: the phonetic weakening of r in postvocalic positions, i.e. hard, far, car. This is a common phonological development, in which consonants in weaker prosodic positions tend to become less articulatorily intense over time. This development was most rapid in southern England, when after the Norman Conquest (1066ce), Anglo-Norman French, which had already experienced significant lenition, became the language of court, and reified after the War of the Roses affirmed London as the English capital.
Early Modern English (c. 1500ce to 1700ce) experienced what is known as the Great Vowel Shift, but consonants were largely stable. The postvocalic rhotic lenition that began several centuries earlier, and its use as a co-articulant put r in a position to be affected by this shift, moving it from an alveolar articulation to primarly a retroflex postalveolar approximant: ɻ. This is the phoneme that was slowly developed, until, by the development of Modern English language in the 18th Century, upper-class accents in London, which would develop into Received Pronunciation, were able to fluently drop it from their articulation entirely.
However, rhotic Early Modern English was already established in North America, and for the most part maintained and developed that rhoticity, especially as a sense of American national identity formed. In America, as English diversified regionally, it shifted from an approximant to a bunched articulatory variant: ɹ. Notably this was not a phonemic shift, but an articulatory and acoustic reconfiguration, resulting in the General American English Rhotic R.
Being specific, in Early Modern English, the rhotic was typically a retroflex postalveolar or apical approximant, articulated with the tongue tip curled up and back with subtle retraction. This is the way the rhotic is still formed in some southern U.S. dialects, and in children's early use of r before transitioning to the bunched form. Acoustically, the approximant ɻ is marked by the same low F3 as the bunched ɹ, but with greater diversity in F2 behavior.
General American English rhoticity is a bunched variant, articulated with the tongue tip lowered, the tongue body raised toward the palate, and the tongue root retracted. This produces a slightly exaggerated form of the low-F3 profile compared to the approximant rhotic. American English is stress-timed and rhythmically dynamic. The physical compactness and stability of the bunched variant allows for more coarticulation with preceding and following vowels, which enables the production of that timing and dynamism. More speculatively, the ease of coarticulation and clear acoustic fingerprint, especially in rapid speech, may halvee encouraged a phonological convergence around the bunched variant rhotic r, from the immigrant speakers that were driving the languages development at the time. In this way, the rhotic R became the articulatory common ground between populations of speakers of General American English.
Thus, by the 20th Century, bunched variant rhoticity had become a key index of Americanness. With the construction of General American English in the 20th century, that rhoticity was preserved and idealized. Since then, it has been institutionalized in speech pathologizing, accent training, and sociolinguistic classism, refining it into means of affecting and performing Americanness with a physical utterance so precisely tuned has a unique spectrographic fingerprint.