Rhoticity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The attribute of spoken language that indicates how clearly the "r" sound is articulated in various dialects and accents
2. A phonetic characteristic that describes the clarity and presence of the "r" phoneme in different languages or speech patterns
3. The degree to which the "r" sound is pronounced and distinguished in speech across various dialects and languages

Etymology: "Rhoticity" is a plain technical coinage, built from "rhotic" with the suffix "-ity" that turns an adjective into a noun for a quality. "Rhotic" itself comes from the Greek letter name "rho," the symbol for the r sound, and was adapted to describe speech sounds in general. The suffix has a longer ancestry: it passes from Latin "-itas" through Old French "-ite" and Middle English "-ite" before settling into the modern "-ity" form. The useful point is that "rhoticity" names a property rather than a sound. A rhotic accent pronounces r after a vowel, as in "car," while a non-rhotic accent drops it, so the term sorts whole varieties of English and other languages by whether that r survives. The "-ity" ending is what lets linguists speak of a dialect as having more or less rhoticity, treating it as a matter of degree.