The way the new England manager says his 'r's is neither here nor there. 'Correct' pronunciation is tied up with prejudice
I am genuinely amazed that there are people who think that there is something wrong or irritating about new England manager Roy Hodgson's speech. Some people seem to think there is only one "correct" or "right" way to make the sound we signify with the letter "r". In fact, both across the UK and Ireland and across Europe there are several possible alternatives, and variations within all of them.
One sound you can make is by closing the back of your throat and making a kind of quick but light growling sound. Most French and German speakers use this but traditionally people from Northumberland and Durham did too. Another is by rolling the tongue against the roof of your mouth. Variants of that can be found in Scotland and Italy or in the French Pyrenees.
Another is by placing your front teeth on your bottom lip or by pursing your lips to make a kind of "w" sound, though many users of this do not pronounce the "w" in words in the same way as they pronounce the "r". This "w" way of pronouncing "r" was common among some Londoners. We recorded a market trader in Hackney for BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth whose speech was like that, but a famous "posh" speaker who had this feature was Roy Jenkins.
The fourth is the received pronunciation and estuary pronunciation (like mine) where the tongue is not rolled against the roof of the mouth but rather squeezed against it. However, although this is "standard" it is by no means always the same. People from the Caribbean or the west country or Ireland produce variants. And very significantly there is a division between those who sound the "r" in words like word or card and those who don't. Across the USA for example, you can hear wide variants of how marked the "r" is in a word like America itself. This depends on the position of the tongue when squeezed against the roof of the mouth and for how long or how strongly.
My view is that none of them is more correct than another. All we have done is to determine that one belongs in the prestige dialect of educated and upper or middle class English people. We then say that it is correct because, for example, that's how the Queen pronounces it. This isn't logical. It's just an expression of an attitude to class, disguised as a comment about speech.
In all the silly stuff that's talked about lazy speech or impediments or any kind of terminology to describe some kind of failure or incorrectness in the way people speak, people never refer to the fact that RP or estuary speech does not show people sounding out the 'r' that most US, Irish, Caribbean and west country and Lancashire and Scots people sound. Apparently a speaker like me is not lazy or failing or impeded in my speech for not sounding out the "r" in card or short.
In other words, many of the comments that people make about other people's speech are really comments about the status of one's own speech or the perceived status of what sounds educated. Hodgson is, as we know, a highly educated man. Listening to his speech, (not very closely) I get the impression he uses at least two, possibly three ways of sounding "r". And good luck to him. To my ear he is completely clear. He expresses himself easily and fluently. I can't think of any occasion I've not understood what he is saying or not caught a word that he is saying.
I have no idea whatsoever whether he is a great, good, medium or crap football manager. In any of those scenarios, his pronunciation of what we signify with "r" is neither here nor there. Making prejudiced comments about it just makes it harder for any user of the non-standard ways of sounding out "r" feel self-conscious and inadequate. A great deal of comments about language are of this order. Hierarchies serve the people at the top of the hierarchy.
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