rhotic
UK/ˈɹəʊ.tɪk/US/ˈɹoʊ.tɪk/
rhotic adjective: that allows the phoneme /ɹ/ to be followed by a vowel, as in bar (/bɑːɹ/) and bard or barred (/bɑːɹd/); (of an English speaker) who speaks with such an accent.
Adjective
rhotic (not comparable)
- That allows the phoneme /ɹ/ to be followed by a vowel, as in bar (/bɑːɹ/) and bard or barred (/bɑːɹd/); (of an English speaker) who speaks with such an accent.
- Rhotic speech is common in Ireland, Scotland, much of the United States, Canada, West Country England, and many parts of the north and west of England.
- Rhotic (or r-ful) dialects are linguistic relics in England, as shown in Map 7-5. Nonrhotic or r-less dialects have been displacing them since the seventeenth century. Among the linguistically most conservative population in England, represented by the NORMs of the SED, both rhotic and nonrhotic...1998, J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, Dialectology, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, page 94
- Having a sound quality associated with the letter R; having the sound of any of certain IPA symbols, including /ɹ/, /ɻ/, /ɚ/, /ɝ/ and /r/.
- Near-synonym: retroflex
- In the IPA, a rhotic vowel (aka R-coloured vowel, retroflex vowel, vocalic r or rhotacised vowel) is indicated by the affixing of a hook diacritic ( ˞ ) to the right of the regular symbol for the vowel. The rhotic consonants are /r/, /ɾ/, /ɹ/, /ɻ/, /ʀ/, /ʁ/, /ɽ/ and /ɺ/.
- Synonyms:
- retroflex
Noun
rhotic (plural rhotics)
- A rhotic consonant or rhotic vowel (R-coloured vowel).
- It is well known that the phonetic realization of rhotics varies considerably from language to language, even from dialect to dialect. Rhotics can be realized as flaps, taps, trills (uvular, coronal or bilabial), or as assibilated or fricative variants.1997, Eulàlia Bonet, Joan Mascarò, “On the representation of contrasting rhotics”, in Fernando Martínez-Gil, Alfonso Morales-Front, editors, Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the Major...
- Spanish also has two rhotics, a tap /ɾ/(vibrante simple) and a trill /r/(vibrante múltiple).2012, Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza, 5: The Phonemes of Spanish, José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke (editors), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, John Wiley & Sons (Wiley-Blackwell)...
Examples of rhotic in a sentence
- Rhotic (or r-ful) dialects are linguistic relics in England, as shown in Map 7-5.1998, J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, Dialectology, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, page 94:
- Except for the Southland area, New Zealand English today is non-rhotic (Wells, 1982: 606).2004, Peter Trudgill, New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes, Oxford University Press, page 68:
- What is normally understood by the term "trill" is a rhotic consonant of the type seen in the Spanish word perro 'dog', or the usual pronunciation of the phoneme /r/ in Parisian French.2007, Robert Blust, “22: The prenasalised trills of Manus”, in Jeff Siegel, John Dominic Lynch, Diana Eades, editors, Language Description...
- The rhotic tokens were analyzed as /r/-ful on both occasions.2012, Jennifer Hay, Alhana Clendon, “(Non)-Rhoticity: Lessons from New Zealand English”, in Terttu Nevalainen, Elizabeth Closs Traugott...
Synonyms of rhotic
Antonyms
Forms of rhotic
| plural | rhotics |
|---|
Origin of rhotic
Back-formation from rhotacism, coined in 1968 by John C. Wells.
Words formed from rhotic
Words that rhyme with rhotic
Questions about rhotic
- What does rhotic mean?
- Rhotic means that allows the phoneme /ɹ/ to be followed by a vowel, as in bar (/bɑːɹ/) and bard or barred (/bɑːɹd/); (of an English speaker) who speaks with such an accent.
- How do you use rhotic in a sentence?
- Rhotic (or r-ful) dialects are linguistic relics in England, as shown in Map 7-5.
- What part of speech is rhotic?
- Rhotic can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce rhotic?
- Rhotic is pronounced /ˈɹəʊ.tɪk/ (UK).
Words near rhotic in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rhotic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “rhotic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rhotic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.