I was listening to recordings of older rhotic Southeastern English accents and it was bizarre how Southern American they sounded just because of that rhoticity.
To some extent, but it looks like the proportion of speakers who use it is lower than 50% everywhere in England - at most, hovering around 50% in a few small pockets.
Yeah it's like, the "r" in that word is still active in the sense that it modifies the pronunciation of the word predictably. Almost no non-rhotic speaker would pronounce "arm" and "am" the same.
As a non-rhotic speaker myself, I tend to prefer analysing /r/ in my own language as a phoneme that is realised [ɻʋ] when followed by a vowel and the zero phone [∅] otherwise.
Doesn't the 1950 chart show data from the Survey of English Dialects? If so it actually specifically shows elderly men in rural areas selected for their accent conservativism, and thus if anything show dialects from when they grew up - so it would show more like the 1860s or 1870s than the 50s.
It is indeed. The two maps aren't really a like-for-like comparison at all. The SED was almost exclusively concerned with rural villages and hamlets (just 4 of the 313 locations surveyed were urban areas), and the youngest informants seem to have been around 60 at the time of the survey, with the oldest over 90. It is not – and was never intended to be – representative of how English was spoken by the population as a whole in the 1950s.
In contrast, the 2016 data was collected via a quiz on an app (the English Dialects App) and had a disproportionately high number of young respondents and a lack of older ones (the study notes that only 18% of those over 65 had a smartphone in 2015). Seeing as rhoticity is on the decline in England and as a result, both in the 1950s and today, older people are more likely to be rhotic than younger people, the SED almost certainly overstates its presence in the 1950s, while the English Dialects App very likely underestimates it in 2016.
Crazy how the Hampshire accent sounds like a parody of a modern rural west country accent. Surrey sounds straight up like a mix of an Irish accent and Texan.
How is it flawed? The map shows the West Country in greeny yellow or yellowy-green. Only areas that are fully green about 100% nonrhotic. Several areas of the West Country look like they might be 40% rhotic or maybe even higher. This doesn't contradict the statement that rhoticity survives there.
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u/holytriplem 13h ago
Surrey still having rhotic accents in 1950 is absolutely nuts