Royal filled pauses
In a comment on "Yair" (2/14/2025), Philip Taylor asserted that he routinely pronounces the orthographic "r" in the typical British filled-pause spelling "er":
« some Americans adopt a mistaken spelling pronunciation, rendering "er" with a final [r] » — well, speaking as a Briton, my "er" pauses, if prolonged, also end with an phoneme, although where exactly in the mouth I produce it I cannot be sure. Certainly it is totally unlike the trilled/r/ with which I might say "Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run run run", but I think that it might be fairly close to the phoneme in my Maigret or Rien de rien.
If Philip actually trills the /r/'s in "Run, rabbit, run", and he's not from Scotland, this is a big dialectological surprise. And it's equally unexpected if he produces something like a French uvular /r/ at the end of his filled pauses. More likely, this is an extreme example of why sociolinguists are skeptical of how people think they talk.
Still, it's worth a bit of time to confirm the OED's r-less assertion (audio) about British filled-pause pronunciation. This would be a big task, overall, given the wide range of British speech across geographical, social, ethnic, and temporal variables, so I thought I'd start with the Royal family. (And I'll also end there, unless Philip's peculiar perceptions return in another form…)
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