ABSTRACT
Rhoticity has been claimed to function as one of major markers in English (e.g., Trudgill 1981): as structural differences are powerful markers of regional affiliation, it can be expected to stay high in speakers’ consciousness (Laver & Trudgill 1979). A variable nature of rhoticity both in native (e.g., Wells 1982; Feagin 1990; Piercy 2012) and non-native speech (e.g., Rindall & Piercy 2013; Sundkvist & Gao 2016; Hansen Edwards 2016) motivates the study of the use of rhoticity among Polish immigrants in the UK. The study reported here investigates the use of rhoticity among five experienced users of English, whose language proficiency before coming to the UK can be estimated at B2/C1 level and who have been referred to as ‘expert learners’ (Waniek-Klimczak 2011, 2018) due to their high level of language proficiency. The degree of rhoticity in the speech of these language users is investigated from the perspective of conditions for variable rhoticity. The internal contexts for rhoticity support earlier findings (e.g., Piercy 2012), i.e., non-prevocalic /r/ appears most often in NURSE words and in stressed contexts; additionally, the effect of word frequency on the lack of rhoticity has been observed. The external conditioning points to the possibility of the use of rhoticity as the sign of ‘otherness’, which can be interpreted as an alternative to a ‘neutral’ accent discussed by Rindall and Piercy (2013).
