INTRUSIVE R

INTRUSIVE R. In some accents of English, including RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION, an /r/ pronounced between the vowels /ɔ, ɑː,ə/ and a following vowel when there is no r in the spelling, as in Australia/r and New Zealand, the India/r Office, draw/r/ing room. Homophonic effects sometimes occur, as in law and order/lore and order. Occasionally, comment on the intrusion is humorous; in Britain, Laura Norder is a friend of the police and an advocate of strong government. The /r/ is in phonological terms an inherent feature of the accent in question, but because it sometimes has an orthographic form (as in czar of Russia) and sometimes does not (as in Shah of Persia), it has been widely stigmatized in the latter case as a sound that should not be there and that makes no sense. The /r/ is accepted in the first of these phrases but often rejected as non-standard in the second. However, its use continues regardless of approval or disapproval, and generally goes unnoticed among those speakers who do it. See LINKING R, NEW YORK, RHOTIC AND NON-RHOTIC.