Linking and intrusive R


Linking R and intrusive R are sandhi or linking phenomena involving the appearance of the rhotic consonant between two consecutive morphemes where it would not normally be pronounced. These phenomena occur in many non-rhotic varieties of English, such as those in most of England and Wales, part of the United States, and all of the Anglophone societies of the southern hemisphere, with the exception of South Africa. These phenomena first appeared in English sometime after the year 1700.

Non-rhotic varieties

By definition, non-rhotic varieties of English only pronounce when it immediately precedes a vowel. This is called r-vocalisation, r-loss, r-deletion, r-dropping, r-lessness, or non-rhoticity.
For example, in non-rhotic varieties of English, the sound does not occur in a word such as tuner when it is spoken in isolation, before an intonation break, or before a word beginning with a consonant. Even though the word is spelled with an , non-rhotic accents do not pronounce an when there is no vowel sound to follow it. Thus, in isolation, speakers of non-rhotic accents may pronounce the words tuner and tuna identically as .
In contrast, speakers of rhotic dialects, such as those of Scotland, Ireland, and most of North America, always pronounce an in tuner and never in tuna so that the two always sound distinct, even when pronounced in isolation. Hints of non-rhoticity go back as early as the 15th century, and the feature was common by the early 18th century.

Linking R

In many non-rhotic accents, words historically ending in may be pronounced with when they are closely followed by another morpheme beginning with a vowel sound. So tuner amp may be pronounced. This is the case in such accents even though tuner would not otherwise be pronounced with an. Here, "closely" means the following word must be in the same prosodic unit. This phenomenon is known as linking R. Not all non-rhotic varieties feature linking R. A notable non-rhotic accent that does not have linking R is Southern American English.

Intrusive R

The phenomenon of intrusive R is an overgeneralizing reinterpretation of linking R into an r-insertion rule that affects any word that ends in the non-high vowels,,, or ; when such a word is closely followed by another word beginning in a vowel sound, an is inserted between them, even when no final was historically present. For example, the phrase bacteria in it would be pronounced. The epenthetic can be inserted to prevent hiatus, two consecutive vowel sounds.
Other recognisable examples are the Beatles singing: "I saw-r-a film today, oh boy" in the song "A Day in the Life", from their 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album; in the song "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis: "supernova-r-in the sky"; at the Sanctus in the Catholic Mass: "Hosanna-r-in the highest"; in the song "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel: "Brenda-r-and Eddie"; and in the phrases, "Law-r-and order" and "Victoria-r-and Albert Museum". This is now common enough in parts of England that, by 1997, the linguist John C. Wells considered it objectively part of Received Pronunciation, though he noted that it was still stigmatized as an incorrect pronunciation, as it is or was in some other standardized non-rhotic accents. Wells writes that at least in RP, "linking and intrusive are distinct only historically and orthographically".
Just as with linking R, intrusive R may also occur between a root morpheme and certain suffixes, such as drawing, withdrawal or Kafkaesque.
Rhotic dialects do not feature intrusive R. A rhotic speaker may use alternative strategies to prevent the hiatus, such as the insertion of a glottal stop to clarify the boundary between the two words. Varieties that feature linking R but not intrusive R, show a clear phonemic distinction between words with and without in the syllable coda.
Some speakers intrude an R at the end of a word even when there is no vowel following. An example is U.S. President George W. Bush speaking to Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown in 2005: "The FEMA-R director's working 24/7".
Margaret Thatcher was nicknamed ‘Laura Norder’ because of her references during her period of office to ‘law and order’ with an intrusive /r/.

Prevalence

A 2006 study at the University of Bergen examined the pronunciation of 30 British newsreaders on nationally broadcast newscasts around the turn of the 21st century speaking what was judged to be "mainstream RP". The data used in the study consisted mostly of the newsreaders reading from prepared scripts, but also included some more informal interview segments. It was found that all the newsreaders used some linking R and 90% used some intrusive R.
Overall, linking R was used in 59.8% of possible sites and intrusive R was used in 32.6% of possible sites. The factors influencing the use of both linking and intrusive R were found to be the same. Factors favouring the use of R-sandhi included adjacency to short words; adjacency to grammatical or non-lexical words; and informal style. Factors disfavouring the use of R-sandhi included adjacency to proper names; occurrence immediately before a stressed syllable; the presence of another /r/ in the vicinity; and more formal style. The following factors were proposed as accounting for the difference between the frequency of linking and intrusive R: