Figure 2.1 Language variation over space
Source: Adapted from Salvucci (1999)
Each case is interesting for different reasons, and each case is vastly
simplified here for our purposes. They are:
the presence or absence of (r) after vowels;
the Northern Cities Chain Shift;
lexical variation and discourse markers;
weak and strong verbs.r-less in Manhattan^3
The presence or absence of the /r/ sound after a vowel has been a
sociolinguistic marker in the Eastern and Southern U.S. for a very long
time, and it is also one of the most exhaustively studied. In the simplest
terms, we are talking about /r/ when it occurs in the following positions or
environments following a vowel:
word final whateve(r), butte(r), humdinge(r),
floo(r), ca(r)