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There are some sounds called the "R-colored diphthong" in English, such as [or] sound in "court" or the [ir] sound in "clear".

My question is simple: are these R-colored diphthongs regarded as phonemes, respectively for native speakers?

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How can you tell?

I think the right thing to do is ask a bunch of Americans who haven't thought much about phonetics whether the vowel in beard is the same as the vowel in bead or as the vowel in bid. If they instantly answer bead (or bid), then you know that for them /ir/ is an allophone of /i/ (or /ɪ/). If they hesitate and can't decide instantly, you can conclude that beard has its own phoneme.

Has anybody actually tried this experiment? Not as far as I know. What answer would you get if you did? My guess is that some Americans think of the vowel in /ir/ as an allophone of /i/, some as an allophone of /ɪ/, and some think of /ir/ as its own phoneme.

For me, as far as I can tell, the vowel of /ir/ is an allophone of /ɪ/, but /ɔr/ is definitely its own phoneme. I pronounce it /or/ and don't perceive it as either /ɔ/ or /oʊ/.

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    The fact that the vowel in /ɔr/ is pronounced differently from /ɔ/ or /oʊ/ doesn't establish that it's a separate phoneme; one could treat it as an allophone of /ɔ/, or of /oʊ/, that occurs before /r/. (Of course, only speakers without the horse-hoarse merger contrast /ɔ/ and /oʊ/ before /r/.)
    – alphabet
    Commented May 5 at 19:25
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    @alphabet: I didn't actually say it was a separate phoneme; I said that it wasn't always pronounced the same as either THOUGHT or GOAT.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented May 5 at 22:13
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    My point is just that whether you perceive it as either /ɔ/ or /oʊ/, or whether you pronounce it as similar to /ɔ/ or /oʊ/, isn't necessarily relevant to the question of its phonemic status.
    – alphabet
    Commented May 6 at 3:53
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    @alphabet: and that gets into the definition of a phoneme. Is it merely the representation of sounds in the brains of native speakers of a language, or is it something less subjective?
    – Peter Shor
    Commented May 6 at 17:49
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    @alphabet: that Wikipedia article contains "However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) that are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language." Doesn't perceived as equivalent refer to the internal mental representations of native speakers?
    – Peter Shor
    Commented May 6 at 18:39
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In my experience, rhotic vowels generally aren't regarded as separate vowel phonemes. But I am not a linguist so you shouldn't take my word for it. Hopefully someone else will post a better answer soon.

As a native speaker of a rhotic variety of English, I do think a somewhat convincing argument can be made that rhotic vowels are phonemes. For example, I have the cot-caught merger, so for me the phoneme /ɔ/ doesn't occur anywhere except before /r/. That's a pretty odd distribution. Now, I also have the horse-hoarse merger, so we could just analyze my [ɔr] as consisting phonemically of tautosyllabic /oʊr/ (assuming we're going with something like John Wells's theory of English syllabification where a word like "glory" gets divided as "glor.y," the stress drawing the intervocalic consonant into the coda of the preceding syllable). But I think it's reasonable enough to analyze it as a diphthong instead. It behaves fairly similarly in some ways to /ɔɪ/ (it also has [ɔ] as the first element, and it can result in some cases from historical sequences of /ɔ/ + a consonant (for example, "drawer" /drɔ˞/ and "lawyer" /lɔɪɚ/).

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    I don't have the cot-caught merger, and I have quite different vowels in court and caught, and in gourd and good, and slightly different ones in cart and cot. I think for many Americans, the /r/-influenced vowels have come unmoored from the other vowels, so the vowel sound in beard isn't the same as either bid or bead.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Oct 3, 2016 at 11:24
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I’m not a linguist. I also would value more highly a response from a actual linguist.

I also have the caught/cot merger, and so I also don’t use ɔ aprat from ɔɹ. But to my thinking, this does not make ɔɹ phonemic (for my accent).

(And what I’m going to say is all based on my own accent. Obviously it won’t apply to all English accents, not even to all American accents).

Let me make an analogy: 1. In the environment of a following /ɹ/: /u/, /ʊ/, and /oʊ/ neutralize, all to be realized as [ɔɹ]. *(caveat at the end) 2. In the environment of a preceding vowel in a stressed syllable, and a following vowel in an unstressed syllable, /t/ and /d/ neutralize, both realized as [ɾ].

I’ve never heard anyone claim that ɾ (in this context) is a phoneme. ɾ is recognized as allophones of t and d, (which happen to be shared in this environment).

By the same reasoning, [ɔ] is an allophone of /u/, /ʊ/, and /oʊ/, which happen to be shared in the environment of a following ɹ. I don’t have any opinion about whether it’s strange or not, but I think the “followed by ɹ” environment explains the distribution as effectively as the distribution of just about any other allophones.

*/u/ and /oʊ/ are sometimes realized as [ɔɹ] (as in sure, shore, which I pronounce identically). At other times they are realized, respectively, as [oʊ.wɹ̩] (as in sewer), and [u.wɹ̩] (as in sewer). I’m not sure whether this hurts my argument or not.

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    A validant try, but you’re still using the unfortunate notation involving [ʊ] that makes all this far harder than it need be. If the threefold homophone set of words spelled so, sew, sow are phonetically [ˈsow], it’s much easier to write the ‑er version: a sewer of thread and a sower of grain are simply [ˈsowɚ] (or if you prefer the “syllabic consonant” version, then [ˈsowɹ̩]). Similarly write the verb sue, the name Sue, and the Sioux tribe as phonetic [ˈsuw]; then a street sewer or a person suing someone else is just [ˈsuwɚ] (or [ˈsuwɹ̩])—or [ˈsjuwɚ] in some speakers.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 5 at 20:53
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    Does your Tory sound much like toe before the /r/, your glory much like glow before the /r/, your hoary much like hoe before the /r/, and your Laurie/lorry much like low before the R? If so then you may well never say /ɔ/ even before /r/, either. Your /or/ sequence is almost certainly simply [oɹ] ɴᴏᴛ [ɔɹ]. This is because [ɔɹ] is a phonetic sequence that nearly no American actually has any longer, outside a few theoretical holdouts in New England.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 5 at 21:03
  • Oh, I’m sorry. I think I now understand what you mean. I have been using the transcription [oʊ] for the vowel in goat (because this seems to be the canonical IPA transcription for Gen. Am., which I speak). But I think now you’re saying it would be easier if I used [ow] for this instead. And similarly, I think you’re also saying you would prefer me to use [uw] for the vowel in goose instead of [u].
    – Timothy Bruce
    Commented Jun 14 at 6:41
  • I can make these changes. It’s too late for me to edit my comments, but I can delete them and re-write them. I don’t know what you want for [ɔ], so I will leave that the same.
    – Timothy Bruce
    Commented Jun 14 at 6:42
  • Note: I’m using [ɔ] to mean the vowel sound that some English-speakers (not me) use for CAUGHT, and which sound I use for words like NORTH.
    – Timothy Bruce
    Commented Jun 14 at 7:05

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