Do New-Englanders *add* R's?

[Ben Zimmer]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 6:03 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
> Heard on a Boston-area radio local news program:
>
> bill-RICK-er
>
> A town north of Boston, spelled Billerica, and in my experience (and
> Wikipedia's) mostly pronounced bill-RICK-uh.

The New England non-rhotic accent typically features an "intrusive
/r/" after non-high vowels, but only when followed by another vowel.
So a New Englander would say "Billerica[r] is a town north of Boston"
but would not add the /r/ before a consonant or utterance-final pause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R#Intrusive_R

When a rhotic speaker imitates a non-rhotic accent, the intrusive /r/
is often improperly extended to other contexts -- such is often the
case with JFK impersonators talking about "Cuba[r]". But as I
described on Language Log, JFK only said "Cuba[r]" prevocalically.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=390

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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