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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.
The earliest traces of a loss of in English are found in the environment before in spellings from the mid-15th century: the Oxford English Dictionary reports bace for earlier barse (today "bass", the fish) in 1440 and passel for parcel in 1468. In the 1630s, the word juggernaut is first attested, which represents the Hindi word jagannāth, meaning "lord of the universe". The English spelling uses the digraph er to represent a Hindi sound close to the English schwa. Loss of coda apparently became widespread in southern England during the 18th century; John Walker uses the spelling ar to indicate the broad A of aunt in his 1775 dictionary and reports that card is pronounced "caad" in 1791 (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 47).
Non-rhotic speakers pronounce the in red, and most pronounce it in torrid and watery (in each case the is followed by a vowel) but not the written R of hard, nor that of car or water. However, in most non-rhotic accents, if a word ending in written "r" is followed closely by another word beginning with a vowel, the is pronounced—as in water ice. This phenomenon is referred to as "linking R". Many non-rhotic speakers also insert epenthetic s between vowels when the first vowel is one that can occur before syllable-final r (drawring for drawing). This so-called "intrusive R" is frowned upon by those who use the non-rhotic Received Pronunciation but even they frequently "intrude" an epenthetic at word boundaries, especially where one or both vowels is schwa; for example the idea of it becomes the idea-r-of it, Australia and New Zealand becomes Australia-r-and New Zealand. The typical alternative used by RP speakers is to insert a glottal stop where an intrusive R would otherwise be placed.
For non-rhotic speakers, what was historically a vowel plus is now usually realized as a long vowel. So car, hard, fur, born are phonetically , , , . This length is retained in phrases, so car owner is . But a final schwa remains short, so water is . The vowels and (or ), when followed by r, become diphthongs ending in schwa, so near is and poor is . The same happens to diphthongs followed by R (or they end in in rhotic speech and that sound turns into a schwa as usual in non-rhotic speech): tire is and sour is (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). For some speakers some long vowels alternate with a diphthong ending in schwa, so wear is but wearing is . Some pairs of words with distinct pronunciations in rhotic accents are homophones in many non-rhotic accents. Examples in Received Pronunciation include father and farther; draws and drawers; formally and formerly; area and airier. In Australian English, which has the weak vowel merger, pairs like batted/battered or boxes/boxers are homonyms. Syllabication interacts with rhoticity: sheer and Shi'a respectively have one and two syllables; in some non-rhotic speech, this may be insufficient for distinguishing them.
Examples of rhotic accents are: Mid-Ulster English and General American. Non-rhotic accents include Received Pronunciation, and Australian, South African and Estuary English.
Most speakers of American English are rhotic. Outside the United States, rhotic accents can be found in Barbados, Canada, Ireland and Scotland. In England, rhotic accents are found in the West Country, and parts of Lancashire; they were traditionally across the whole of Lancashire and bordering parts of Yorkshire, Northumberland and rural parts of south-east England, although the younger generation are more likely to be non-rhotic in these areas. Other areas with rhotic accents include India (particularly in southern India and Maharashtra where the Rs are rolled), the Philippines, and Otago and Southland in the far south of New Zealand's South Island, where a Scottish influence is apparent.
Areas with non-rhotic accents include Africa, Australia, Malta, most of the Caribbean, most of England (notably Received Pronunciation speakers), most of New Zealand and Wales. Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong are mostly non-rhotic.
Canada is entirely rhotic except for small isolated areas in southwestern New Brunswick, parts of Newfoundland, and Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.
In the United States, large parts of the South were formerly non-rhotic, but this is sharply recessive. Today, non-rhoticity in Southern American English is found primarily among older speakers, and only in some areas such as New Orleans, southern Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, and Norfolk, Virginia (Labov, Ash, and Bomberg 2006: 47–48). Parts of New England are non-rhotic as well as New York City and surrounding areas. The case of New York is especially interesting because of a classic study in sociolinguistics by William Labov showing that the non-rhotic accent is associated with older and middle- and lower-class speakers, and is being replaced by the rhotic accent. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is largely non-rhotic.
There are a few accents of Southern American English where intervocalic is deleted before an unstressed syllable and at the end of a word even when the following word begins with a vowel. In such accents, pronunciations like for Carolina and for "bear up" are heard (Harris 2006: 2–5). These pronunciations also occur in AAVE (Pollock et al. 1998)
Speakers of non-rhotic accents who are trying to speak with a rhotic accent such as General American will often add an after vowels which are long in their native speech even when there has never been an there; an example would be Liverpudlian Paul McCartney's performance of Till There Was You on the album With The Beatles, where he sings "There were birds in the sky, | But I never sawr them winging, | No, I never sawr them at all, | Till there was you." (assuming that he didn't do so on purpose).
The rhotic consonant is dropped or vocalised under similar conditions in other Germanic languages, notably German and Danish. In most varieties of German, /r/ in the syllable coda is frequently realised as a vowel or a semivowel, or , especially in the unstressed ending -er and after long vowels: for example sehr [], besser []. Similarly, Danish /r/ after a vowel is, unless preceded by a stressed vowel, either pronounced as (mor "mother" , næring "nourishment" ) or merged with the preceding vowel while usually influencing its quality ( and / are realised as long vowels and , and , and are all pronounced as ) (løber "runner" , Søren Kierkegaard (personal name) ) .
Among the Turkic languages, Uyghur displays more or less the same feature, as syllable-final /r/ is dropped, while the preceding vowel is lengthened: for example Uyghurlar [] ‘Uyghurs’. The /r/ may, however, sometimes be pronounced in unusually "careful" or "pedantic" speech; in such cases, it is often mistakenly inserted after long vowels even when there is no phonemic /r/ there.
Similarly in Yaqui, an indigenous language of northern Mexico, intervocalic or syllable-final /r/ is often dropped with lengthening of the previous vowel: pariseo becomes //, sewaro becomes /sewajo/.