Fwd: Re: rhoticizm

[vhouwer]

Dear all,

Much the same as described for Norwegian is happening
with Dutch as spoken in Flanders, Belgium, with the more
dorsal /r/ rapidly gaining ground, and heard much more
frequently on the spoken mass media than even 10
years ago. Many older speakers in Flanders consider the
'French r' (but it is decidely not a real French r) to be
a 'speech defect', but that view is on the way out as more
and more people use this variant. Dorsal /r/ now seems to
 run in families, but mainly among the children in the
 families.
An anecdote from my own daughter, who until age 3 heard
no other children speak Dutch (she lived in the US) and
had been substituting /r/ by /j/ when she spoke Dutch (I
myself and other adults in my family, i.e., my daughter's
models, use the apical /r/, not the dorsal): the very
day that she met up with another Dutch-speaking three-
year-old, who happened to use the dorsal r, my daughter
started using the dorsal /r/ herself and stopped substituting
/r/ by /j/ altogether. I must confess I did not like her
use of dorsal /r/ (didn't fit my own sociolinguistic iden-
tity...) - when at the age of 5 my daughter was still using
the dorsal /r/ I decided perhaps I'd try to teach her the
apical /r/ while we were away from Belgium (and continued
exposure to dorsal /r/ from other children and some adults), and after
an hour or so in the car of having her repeat
 briefly trilled /r/'s in all manner of words and song snippets
my daughter proudly said words with apical r's, and she
never went back to the dorsal /r/. But now at age 13 she
tells me it was silly of me to try and get her off the
dorsal /r/. She's probably right...

--Annick De Houwer


> Some more crosslinguistic info on /r/ acquisition - from Norwegian:
>
> Norwegian has both apical and dorsal /r/, depending on dialect. The
> apical /r/s are most often not trilled, but rather produced as a tap.
>
> For Norwegian children, /r/ is recognised as a problematic sound, but
> it is only the apical /r/ which causes problems even up to 4 and
> beyond (being typically substituted with [l], [j], [], but never
with
> [w]). For some, the (apical) /r/ problem persists into adulthood. The
> dorsal /r/ does not cause the same problems and is acquired earlier.
> It is not uncommon for speech therapists to teach children from
> "apical r dialects" to produce a dorsal /r/ instead of an apical one
> when they have /r/ problems. This functions well, also because the
> dorsal /r/ is acceptable and occasionally found in speakers with
> "apical r dialects" as a result of contact with "dorsal r dialects",
> and then not at all considered a speech defect, but normal (and even
> rather posh).
> Hanne Gram Simonsen
>
>
> *************************
> Hanne Gram Simonsen
> Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Oslo
> P.O.Box 1102, Blindern, 0317 Oslo - Norway
> tel: (47) 22 85 41 82;    fax: (47) 22 85 69 19
> e-mail: h.g.simonsen at ilf.uio.no
>
>
>