Rhoticity Loss Revisited.

Dialect research; Trudgill, Peter; Gordon, Elizabeth; Archaeology; Stress (Linguistics); Speech; Oral history; English language

The article cites a research on dialect archaeology focusing on rhoticity, conducted by Peter Trudgill and Elizabeth Gordon in Australia. The researchers analyzed the recorded speech of six Australians born in the late nineteenth century, under the 1988 New South Wales bicentennial oral history project. They found out that all speakers had vestigial rhoticity, contending that what was exported to the Southern Hemisphere was not a nonrhotic variety, as previously thought, but an English in the process of rhoticity loss. These findings presage a reanalysis of rhoticity loss in the world's English language.