DialectGuessr

Pronunciation

Rhotic vs Non-Rhotic: Do You Pronounce the R in “Car”?

This single feature divides the English-speaking world roughly in half. Scotland, Ireland, most of the United States, Canada, India and the West Country pronounce the R at the end of car. Most of England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Boston and much of the Caribbean do not.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

When you say “car” by itself, do you pronounce an R sound at the end?

Say “That is my car.” Think about the sound, not whether the word contains R.

Answer it yourself and see where you land on the map →

Which accents do what

Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.

Yes — there is a clear R sound

In these profiles, the R at the end of “car” is pronounced.

No — it ends in a vowel sound

In these profiles, “car” ends in a vowel, with no R sound.

It varies

In these profiles, R at the end of a word is sometimes pronounced and sometimes dropped.

Why this question is in the survey

Pronunciation questions carry more weight in the scoring than vocabulary questions do, because they are much harder to change deliberately. People move house and pick up new words; the vowel system learned in childhood tends to stay. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least two people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.