Southeastern phonology: consonants R

/r/ is generally realized in Southeastern accents as an alveolar or post-alveolar approximant, . Southeastern accents are non-rhotic, but /r/ is pronounced in postvocalic position if the following word begins with a vowel (so-called linking /r/, thus  car alarm, but  car park). Intrusive /r/ is used in sequences in which an epenthetic /r/ is inserted in contexts which do not historically contain /r/: either, like linking /r/, across word-boundaries (as in pizza  and pasta), or word-internally. The latter habit is stigmatized to some degree, especially where it occurs in word-internal positions. Post-vocalic rhoticity appears to have vanished altogether from the relic area (Reading and Berkshire) mentioned by Wells (1982: 341), and appears to be advancing westward at a fairly rapid pace. In terms of the phonetic quality of /r/ in pre-vocalic positions, there is plentiful evidence of a dramatic rise in the frequency of the labiodental approximant  in southern England, and indeed also in parts of the North. This feature, formerly regarded as an affectation, a speech defect, or an infantilism, is now heard very frequently in the accents of a wide range of English cities, and appears generally to be more favored by young working-class speakers than by middle-class ones. Kerswill (1996: 189) suggests that the increased usage of  (and [f, v] for /θ , ð​/) among younger speakers represents a failure to eradicate immature pronunciations as a result of an attrition of the stigma attached to these forms.