I’ve never heard anyone suggest that North American children don’t also mispronounce “r” as much as children anywhere else.
It’s my understanding that they can hear the difference, but are incapable of pronouncing it.
[QUOTE=jjimm]
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.
[/QUOTE]
This is what I thought of, too. I still have a chuckle with the name “Rick”, pronouncing it something like “Wrick”, at least in my head.
“Wuv, twue wuv…”
A little English boy named John Entwistle had difficulty articulating /r/, so on the song “Whiskey Man” he double-tracked his vocals, singing “fwend” and “flend” in the hope that when put together they would come out sounding like “friend.”
Fwee Woger! Fwee Wodewick!