Rhotic and non-rhotic accents


English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and non-rhotic, depending on when the phoneme (realized as an alveolar approximant in most dialects) is pronounced. (The word rhotic is pronounced in General American and in RP.) Rhotic speakers pronounce written in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce only if it is followed by a vowel sound (see "linking and intrusive R"), and not always even then. In linguistic terms, non-rhotic accents are said to exclude the phoneme from the syllable coda. This is commonly referred to as the post-vocalic R, although that term can be misleading because not all Rs that occur after vowels are excluded in non-rhotic English.