Until just a few years ago, I thought I was hearing a speech impediment when I heard someone with a certain English dialect, because they pronounce their “th” sounds in words as “f” or “v”. For a while I subscribed to a podcast from a particular location (I think in London with a cockney accent), and pretty much all the people on the podcast did the same thing, so I figure it must be a dialect.
So now I’m wondering about something else I’ve always considered a speech impediment. You know the wedding scene in The Princess Bride where the clergyman starts off with “Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togeder today. Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam…”
But then this weekend I heard a podcast of a Christian professional public speaker who has this same speech characteristic (not nearly as extreme as the clergyman) - Rob Parsons. You can hear a small example here.
So was I mistaken about this too? Rob parsons seems to be from South Wales. Is that a dialect thing, or did he overcome a speech impediment to become a professional public speaker?
I’m British, that guy has a speech impediment (a problem with his R’s). It may be exaggerated by his Welsh accent (Welsh often rolls its r’s), but my wife is from South Wales, and she most certainly doesn’t talk like him!
Some notable speech impediments are named so that they exemplify the sound being impeded (or, in other words, a sufferer can’t name the impediment without triggering it.) Lisp (“lithp”) and rhoticism (“wotacism”) are obvious examples.
I know someone who speaks like this. People often ask him about his ‘accent’ and he always claims to have been raised in different regions, but his siblings don’t talk like that.
That’s not an inability to pronounce “r’s” though, it’s just that the accent doesn’t pronounce them. My southern English accent is also non-rhotic, so I don’t pronounce the “r” in words like “car” or “park” or “garden”*, but that doesn’t mean I can’t pronounce the “r” sounds in “marriage” or “rabbit” or “Rolls-Royce”.
of course, reading that back in this sentence I would pronounce the first r in “car or”, as it liaises with the vowel.
My uncle (dad’s brother) has a very different accent from my father, even though they grew up together and have never lived more than a couple of dozen miles apart. I always just assumed it was a kind of affectation (he was always a bit of a social climber), but it’s one of those things you can’t really ask.
The “Kennedy Boston” accent certainly does pronounce r’s – just not there. Listen to a Kennedy speech when he talks about Castro and Cuber pronouncing the one and putting another one in where it doesn’t even belong.
John Ross Bowie, who plays Barry Kripke on Big Bang Theory, has this speech impediment. The character has it x100, but the actor naturally has a mild form of it and plays it up for the role.
If I may geek out for a moment: Terrance Dicks, who was one of the major writers on Doctor Who back in the 1970s, has this particular characteristic in his speech. I know this because I’ve listened to him on innumerable DVD audio commentaries.
As with the can’t-say-rhoticism issue, it always struck me as a little sad that he has difficulty saying his own name: “I’m Tewwance Dicks, and I wote this episode.”
It seems from the anecdotes here that it may not be a standard British English dialect, but it’s more common in England and maybe Wales, and more acceptable.
In the US if a kid can’t say his R’s right, he gets lots of speech therapy to correct that, because it would be a huge impediment to his future success. It may be shitty of us, but that’s just not an acceptable way to talk here.
I have a slightly related question: an old boyfriend of mine used to talk about a guy he worked with who would often call him a cunt, only he pronounced it “cumf”. Is that a common thing? I thought the point was that the guy had a speech impediment but just recently on SNL, Tina Fey played an eccentric old auntie and her last name was “cumf”. Was that being sly and sneaking the dreaded “c word” by the sensors?
In non-rhotic UK accents, this happens when the following word starts with a vowel, so that it’s something like a “linking r”. Instead of two vowel sounds bumping up against each other in two words, an “r” is inserted. Perhaps one of the more popular examples of this is Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova.” (Well, popular if you’re of a certain age.) When the refrain “Champagne supernova [pause] a champagne supernov[er] in the sky” is sung, the intrusive r only appears when the word is directly elided into a word starting with a vowel sound.
That said, I don’t know for sure whether the Boston accent follows the same pattern, but I imagine it’s modeled after similar non-rhotic accents.
Groucho Marx was from Manhattan, and he did the same thing. Here he is singing the famous song “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” Listen and you can clearly hear him singing “Lydier, oh Lydia.” Curiously, it doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen with considerable frequency.
