Consonants R

Rhoticity is the norm in NfldE. That said, a largely English-settled area in Conception Bay – located on the Avalon peninsula west of the capital, St. Johns – displays variable postvocalic /r/ deletion in syllable codas, e.g. there, far, four. This feature is locally stigmatized, yet continues to characterize the speech of some younger residents of the area, notably working-class males. It also occurs, though much less frequently, in rural communities within the greater St. John’s metropolitan area. South of the capital, on the exclusively Irish-settled Avalon, traditional speakers in several rural communities likewise display a tendency towards r-deletion in syllable coda position. These are communities that in earlier times may have been characterized by a (highly marked) uvular pronunciation of r (cf. Hickey 2002: 296–297).

Elsewhere on the island and in Labrador, a number of traditional speakers from a range of communities display a variable tendency to postvocalic r-deletion in unstressed syllables (not only in lettER-words, but also in such cases as unstressed there’s). For a small set of lexical items, an r-less pronunciation is common, as in the first syllable of partridgeberry (reanalyzed by some as patchyberry). Conversely, some English-settled areas of the province display the now recessive feature of hyperrhoticity in the form of r-insertion in unstressed syllables following [ə] (as in tuna, fellow, tomorrow); r-insertion remains fairly common, however, in the stressed syllable of Chicago (and less so in wash).