R’s name displays well the letter’s remarkable sound, a sound created by vibration of the palate, throat, and tongue, with the tongue approaching the palate. If you begin making the R sound, then lift your tongue tip to your palate, you’ll find you’ve switched to L. Phonetically, L is R’s sister; the two letters constitute the small category of consonants called “liquids.” R’s open tongue position allows for more throat than L, and throatiness is R’s hallmark.

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Pronunciation-wise, R ranges widely. The sound represented by the symbol R means different things to various speakers, not only from language to language but within English itself.

Parisian French pronounces R as a demure gargle along the throat and palate — a sound whose exact pronunciation is nigh on impossible for most English speakers. (Can you say regarder? We want to begin the R at the tongue tip and bring in the throat afterward.) In Croatian, a written R may include a vowel sound; thus the city name Trieste is spelled as Trst, for example. In Spanish and Italian, the R is trilled; you say it by vibrating the tongue tip against the palate: misericordia. Scottish R is trilled, too, providing the famous Scots burr.

Ask an Englishman of a certain social class to say “earl” and you’ll hear “euhl,” the R flattened into a brief tightening of the throat, very unlike the earnest R of a North American or Irishman. Or maybe not: People of Brooklyn or Queens might diminish R to the point of omitting it in some words. Meet ja’s at Toidy-toid Street at tree o’clock.

Together, the Brooklyn accent and the cited British accent point to a more general principle — namely, R is known to slip away from some forms of spoken English. The root cause is that R takes effort to say: It has a relatively demanding pronunciation, requiring a stiff tongue tip. Witness the speech of young children, or of adults with impediments, who may replace R with the more easily formed W. “Pesky wabbit!” declares Elmer Fudd, perpetually frustrated enemy of Warner cartoon hero Bugs Bunny. And this writer recalls playing Three Little Pigs with a three-year-old daughter who, when threatened with destruction of her last piggy house, would reply gleefully, “No! It’s stwong of bwicks!”.

The letter’s shape is cleverly and even plausibly captured in this 1836 print, part of a fanciful alphabet of human figures, published in Paris.

Studies of the Brooklyn-type accent show that R is pronounced properly before vowels but is dropped often at the ends of words — whence the cry “Beeh heeh!” from vendors who carried tall, foam-brimmed paper cups on sided trays through the stands of Yankee Stadium in the 1960s — and is especially prone to be dropped before a D, L, N, or TH. Those consonants send the tongue tip to a position rather different from the R position; thus they render the R inconvenient as a preliminary. Why say “weird” when “weeyd” is more restful to the tongue? (Not that it’s a conscious personal choice, of course; rather, the group accent develops along lines of convenience.) The human wish to conserve tongue energy lies behind many changes to spoken languages through the ages, including the kinds of slurring that helped to transform late Latin into Europe’s Romance tongues, around 200 to 800 a.d.

Far from New York City, you can find the dropped R (minus the Brooklyn vowels) in Boston. Pahk yuh cah in Hahvahd Yahd — and it’ll get towed away by the police! Linguists go so far as to divide all English-language pronunciation into two accent groups: rhotic and nonrhotic. (The adjective “rhotic,” from rho, the name of the ancient Greek R letter, is just a fancy word meaning “of R” or, in this case, “using R.”)

Rhotic speakers pronounce the R as written; nonrhotic ones drop R or diminish it in

photo: Carol Barnstead photography

certain positions in words. Nonrhotic local accents occur in the American South, the mid-Atlantic states, and New England (but not the Midwest or West), also in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, much of the Caribbean, much of England, and Wales (but not Scotland).

The divide between rhotic and nonrhotic can be social as well as geographic. Linguistic

surveys of the greater New York City area confirm that nonrhotic speakers tend to come from longtime local families of traditionally lower income, as compared with rhotic speakers. In the greater London area, just the opposite: Nonrhoticism is a part of ideal British speech — “euhl” for “earl” — and signifies education and higher income.