Everytime (at least on TV) I see a little English boy, he doesn’t pronounce his 'R’s. They come out as 'W’s. “Wabbit” instead or “Rabbit”.
Is this some kind of British -English thing, based on children still trying to attain received pronunciation, or is it just random speech impediments?
My 5 y.o. son is American and he can’t pronounce Rs and Ls yet.
FWIW,
Rob
I think it’s a stereotype which is meant to appeal to non-natives. Similar to how Hugh Grant is truly representative of englishmen.
tim
A lot of young kids find Ls and Rs difficult. My daughter was probably 5 or 6 before she started pronouncing these correctly. She would have said “Yook at the wabbit.”
Cute, but thankfully she grew out of it.
Rumour has it that Susan Olsen got the roll as Cindy Brady because she had a lithp.
It’s more than a stereotype though - in some London accents, and “Estuary English”, a soft R is part of the dialect.
I find it alluring in certain ladies, and feeble in many men.
I’m an American in my mid-70’s, and there are still some things I don’t order when eating out. One is Welsh Warebit (with wed wine).
Weally. 
That’s Welsh wabbit. “Warebit” is hypercowwection.
Or cwningen Gymreig (the plural, cwningod Cymreig, alliterates better; replace [r] with [w] to suit).
Funny you should ask this. I’ve noticed an equally odd (but opposite) phenomenon of American toddlers on TV.
They have a strange way of over-emphasizing the ‘r’ sound in every word they speak that contains it.
Picking one example at random (because she was on TV yesterday) - Ross Doyle’s daughter from Frasier.
The over-emphasis, I suspect, is due to the inability to get it correct in the first years of speech. So, once they get it, it becomes a proud accomplishment of real, grown-up pronunciation.
Maybe also the result of speech lessons at drama school, in the case of TV kids, at least.
To me, this is simply evocative of “baby/toddler/small child talk”, having nothing to do with the speaker’s country of origin.
Was that the wascally wabbit that wan wegularly awound the wugged wocks?
Wight!
In the movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy” (or something like that), there appear Africans whose language includes clicks by a maneuver, I think, that involves the tongue and hard palate. Do their toddlers have difficulty making those sounds?
I do.
That would be a great question for Mr. Dibble.
I can say that a lot of toddlers (perhaps close to all) make sounds that are essentially click consonants as part of their verbal play.
I’d also note that it is easily transferable to kids who already speak correctly.
In my kids kindergarten class, most of the kids spoke (mostly) clearly and enunciatated appropriately. There was one younger girl (very outgoing and headstrong) who spoke with the r/w pronunciation. Within a short period, a lot of the kids picked up on the speech pattern and were emulating her…including ours. I should note that they weren’t aping her or making fun of the way she spoke, but just started talking the same way.
We managed to have them correct themselves, but it still creeps in when they are acting ‘goofy’ (2 years later).
Was Rick from *The Young Ones of this denomination? I remember that he often softened his R’s until they sounded like W’s. “He’s just joshing, Mrs. Vyvyan - we’re really tewiffic fwiends.”
“red rock west” is a very difficult movie title. there were many amusing mispronunciations by adults when purchasing tickets.
The Young Ones was made just before the estuary accent really came into its own. I suspect that Rick’s soft R is there to indicate something of a character flaw: the overgrown child with ill-conceived political opinions, with a dose of patheticness, mocking the many middle-class ‘Socialist Workers’ that were trying to live down their social background, that were all over the bloody place in the 1980s.