"Hyperrhoticism"

[Wilson Gray]

A while back, I posted a note regarding a cousin of mine who pronounces
unstressed
"a" and "the" as [@r] and [D at r] even before consonants. Although I was under
the
impression that this was a peculiarity of said cousin's idiolect, I've since
discovered
that this over-use of "ahruh" was actually once fairly common in older BE
(my cousin
is eighty-five-ish) by going to iTunes and listening to thirty seconds of
about 200 old
blues songs. [One must conduct research as one can.]

-Wilson Gray

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org