🔊 With clear r sound 🔤 An r-like sound

rhotic

1 9.1

An accent where people pronounce the R sound clearly

adjective
/ˈroʊtɪk/

Specialized

: rótico

In a rhotic dialect, the letter 'r' is pronounced at the end of words, such as in 'car' and 'far'.
rhotic liquid

Examples

An additional 21 children participated in the experiment but were not included in the analysis because of a lack of speaking during the task (n = 10), producing less than 75% of tokens (n = 1), only repeating after the mother (n = 1), the mother having a Canadian (rhotic) accent (n = 1), or ceiling performance (n = 8).

Academic text (2013)
Many people associate a strong, clear rhotic accent with American English.
She prefers the rhotic pronunciation of 'r' because it makes her speech sound more vibrant.

Surface Forms

rhotic positive

Morphology

rhotic = r (transparent) = rhot + ic

Formed from the combining form referring to the letter/sound 'r' plus the adjective-forming suffix '-ic', so the meaning 'relating to r' is directly inferable by learners.

Etymology

The word rhotic comes from the Greek name for the letter rho, the letter 'R'. So rhotic describes a dialect or a sound that pronounces the 'R' clearly.