Nuts and Bolts: rhotacism.

 I think rhotacism may be getting rarer. There seem to be fewer adults about who can't pronounce the letter R, and those that do seem to be fairly advanced in age.

I don't know why this should be. Perhaps it's just that a young person displaying rhotacism doesn't get a job on the telly. 

Anyway, pronouncing the R sound successfully quite often takes five years for a child to master (and sometimes seven) and until then it's cute. After that, it can be a nuisance to anyone trying to communicate something about rhinos, for instance.

The odd thing about the word rhotacism is that it's the term for two opposite things (which makes it a contranym, hurray!), which must be rare for a word made up by linguists to use to talk about language. I mean, you would have thought that linguists would have got the hang of communicating things clearly, but the word rhotacism is used by them to mean both using the R sound less than is standard (or, sometimes, not at all), as in the case of someone who can't pronounce an R sound; and also using an R sound more.

The using-it-more meaning is actually quite sensible, because the word rhotacism comes from Greek word rhōtakizein, which comes from the Greek letter rho: 

ρ

 (a Greek rho is pretty much the same as our letter R (though confusingly it looks like a P when it's upper-case)). This using-the-R--sound-more meaning describes the tendency over a long period of time for sounds like z, or d or l or n in a language to change to an R sound. 

It follows that the using-the-R-sound-less meaning, the one where the sound R can't be pronounced at all, is really rather perverse.

But then I suppose that sense isn't that fashionable among academics at the moment.