# (North) American vs UK accents: does word-final /r/ really sound this different? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 26, 2017, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062 "2017-03-26T06:17:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/101 "2017-04-05T10:48:52Z")
Spectre, that’s an issue if you’re trying to use IPA for other languages. I’m trying to stick to speakers of English learning IPA to discuss English pronunciation with other speakers of English. The issue you point out isn’t relevant to that. For that you won’t have to learn symbols for sounds that aren’t phonemic in English. ---
**Author:** ![antechinus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/fbc32d/32.png) [@antechinus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/antechinus)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/102 "2017-04-05T11:06:43Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > Is there a difference between the sound “aw” makes and the sound “ar” makes to you? Glad you wrote this. I listened again and realised she said aw as in “law”. I thought she said “lar”. Yes, they do sound different. “Aw” is same as “oar”. To a US person, my “oar” would have a very soft /r/. ---
**Author:** ![antechinus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/fbc32d/32.png) [@antechinus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/antechinus)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/103 "2017-04-05T11:21:17Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > You’re misunderstanding. His perception of what an “r” sounds like is not the same as yours, so when he says that he hears an “r” sound in there, it’s completely different than what you would describe an “r” as sounding like. > > My take on it is that an English person perceives the “r” as changing the vowel sound that precedes it, not as making what you and I would consider a consonant sound. So when he said that Americans say “coffee” like it has an “r” in it, he’s really saying that the first vowel sound is different in American accents. > > Do you remember the 80s pop singer Sade? There was a note on the album that it should be pronounced like “shar-day,” but that note was directed at a British English audience. People over here in America pronounced her name with an American “r” sound, which was incorrect. If she described the sound to an American, she should have transcribed it as “shah-day.” Same thing with the “r” in coffee example. Good explanation. Ask a British English speaking person to pronounce Far and Fah, Bar and Bah, Shar and Shah, etc. I suspect each pair will sound the same. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/104 "2017-04-05T15:34:53Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > You can try it right now: hold your hand an inch or two away from your mouth and say those words, and you’ll feel that puff of air. But when those stops are preceded by /s/, they are unaspirated. Do the same test with the words _spin_ and _skin_, and the puff of air should be absent. Really? I aspirate the words spin and skin just like I do pin and kin. I can’t even imagine trying to do it without aspirating - how is that possible? You have a good point about not being able to perceive sounds that aren’t in your dialect. When I was younger I was having a beer in Germany with an Englishman who spoke fluent German. I asked him the proper way to pronounce the name of the beer printed on the beer glass: König. To my ear, he replied “koo-nig.” So I repeated “koo-nig” just like he said. He said “No, koo-nig.” So I repeated. No again. He was saying a subtly different pronunciation of the vowel sound that was important to him, but I couldn’t even hear. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/105 "2017-04-05T17:42:14Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Spectre, that’s an issue if you’re trying to use IPA for other languages. I’m trying to stick to speakers of English learning IPA to discuss English pronunciation with other speakers of English. The issue you point out isn’t relevant to that. For that you won’t have to learn symbols for sounds that aren’t phonemic in English. I beg to differ, because it’s clear from this thread that speakers of even just different dialects of the same language will tend to describe the same sound differently. Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/106 "2017-04-05T17:58:11Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > I beg to differ, because it’s clear from this thread that speakers of even just different dialects of the same language will tend to describe the same sound differently. > > Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk Right but not every variant has phonemic relevance in every situation. In the usual “Brits say this and Yanks say this” thread the issue of aspiration of pulmonic consonants is not phonemic, and both the Brit or the Yank will have not only to learn the symbols but will have to go to considerable effort to understand and hear the very concept. I’m trying to show that the Brit and the Yank need only learn a handful of symbols—particularly for a handful of key vowel sounds—and they will be able to get their points across much easier. If they then want to explore much more complex issues of pronunciation that cross language barriers or say Indian English accents then it would be useful to get into more complex subjects like aspiration, but that’s a more advanced class. IPA for Beginners doesn’t require it. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2017, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/107 "2017-04-06T00:15:28Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Since I already know IPA and I don’t teach it on a regular basis, I can’t say I know what a good website is. But I bet **Johanna** has some recommendations along those lines. It’s crazy easy. You need nothing more than Wikipedia. Each of the IPA symbols on the [IPA for English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English) page is linked to its own article with a clearly pronounced audio file for each one. Also, study of the vowel chart makes the relationships between vowel sounds much clearer to visualize, and it is arranged according to the actual shape of your mouth. > [@](#): > > My theory, as stated above, is that you already know 16 and need learn only 28 for basic facility. I wonder whether Johanna, who is an actual expert on the subject, agrees. While I don’t call myself an expert (it’s sweet of you, though, I’m not complaining), I rate myself with a “near-complete” understanding of IPA. Much of the nitty gritty of the many possible click articulations in [Ju|'hoan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ju%C7%80%27hoan_dialect) still escapes me because I haven’t practiced it the way I’ve practiced the rest of our beautiful periodic table of phonetics. But yeah, absolutely what he said. > [@](#): > > In my opinion, the content of “Brits talk like this, Americans talk like this” conversations on the SDMB are 85 to 95 percent misunderstandings, repetition, and talking past each other, and that’s pretty much because of a failure to use and understand IPA. As I said before, if you can already speak, understand, read, and write English, then you can easily learn IPA for the purposes of discussing English pronunciation. That’s all I’ve been tryin to tell yas. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2017, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/108 "2017-04-06T01:21:43Z")
I wonder how dependent English communication is on coloration. We cope rather well with a very wide variety of accents, but sometimes barely intelligible speech can be understood by its coloring. The three based hues of cadence, pitch and stress combine to paint a statement sometimes to the extent that primary articulation is barely more than decoration. This is why sometimes we can pull the muddy words out of a spoken sentence to make sense of them, but when the word is uttered on its own in a strange accent, it is often harder. Coloration probably applies to a variety of other languages, but it may lose some weight in the tonally semantic ones. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2017, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/109 "2017-04-06T05:19:05Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > Really? I aspirate the words spin and skin just like I do pin and kin. I can’t even imagine trying to do it without aspirating - how is that possible? I should have been clearer. It’s only the /p/ or /k/ that is aspirated or not; aspiration is manifested as a puff of air spoken with the voiceless stop. In pronouncing the rest of the word you are usually exhaling the air that activates your vocal chords. But in the case of an unaspirated stop, the flow of air stops for the split second it takes for that sound to be pronounced. It is, after all, a ‘stop’. The Wiki article explains it better than I was able to. Also, the passage reminds me of the word contrastive, which I really could have used earlier had I but remembered it. > [@Wikipedia](#): > > In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most Indian and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive, while in Arabic and Persian, all stops are aspirated. > > To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one’s mouth, and say spin [spɪn] and then pin [pʰɪn]. One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with pin that one does not get with spin. If you listen to a Romance language native speaker pronounce a word-initial stop, e.g. _perro_ in Spanish, you should be able to hear that it sounds different from a word-initial stop in English, and that happens because the stop is always unaspirated in those languages. I can’t describe the difference subjectively, other than to say that in those languages, stops in word-initial position sound crisper or brighter or more emphatic than they do in English. It wasn’t until I studied phonology that I learned the underlying reason for the difference. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2017, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/110 "2017-04-06T06:53:18Z")
It’s a bit like listening to a Hebrew speaker speak English - even when they’re very good, and they have all the obvious consonant and vowel sounds down pat, somehow their S and T just doesn’t sound right. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2017, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/111 "2017-04-06T14:44:07Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > If you listen to a Romance language native speaker pronounce a word-initial stop, e.g. _perro_ in Spanish, you should be able to hear that it sounds different from a word-initial stop in English, and that happens because the stop is always unaspirated in those languages. When I say _perro_ I also don’t aspirate it - funny I never noticed the difference. However I still aspirate the p and k in spin and skin. There’s not as much airflow because my teeth start out being closed to say the “s” sound but other than that it’s still aspirated. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2017, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062/112 "2017-04-06T15:17:57Z")
The aspiration issue is critical to Chinese. Americans are now being taught to say “doe fu” for “tofu” and “bay jing” for Beijing. But those B, D, and J sounds are really unaspirated (or breathless) P, T, and (close to) CH sounds. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/north-american-vs-uk-accents-does-word-final-r-really-sound-this-different/783062.md?page=5)