From these studies it is quite clear that (r) is highly variable, and that its
social significance is strongly dependent on place (as demonstrated in the
New England studies), age, and race. In Boston and New Hampshire, (r) is
variable across a wide variety of factors to the degree that “No speaker was
either categorically r-ful or categorically r-less, and thus no social group
was categorically r-ful or r-less” (Irwin and Nagy 2010).
At one point the absence of postvocalic (r) was common to most of New
York City (and the East Coast more generally), but by the time Labov took
up this study in the early 1960s, that had begun to change. Labov observed
that in Manhattan, some people were r-less and others r-ful. He
hypothesized that the shift toward r-fulness was linked to social prestige and
thus that the variation would pattern to socioeconomic factors. In order to
test that hypothesis, he conducted a field study which took place at three
department stores in Manhattan: Saks, Macy’s, and Klein’s. The department
stores represented three distinct socioeconomic classes: Saks’s shoppers
were well-to-do; Macy’s were middle class; and Klein’s were working class.
The fieldworkers in each store asked counter clerks for directions to a
department they already knew to be on the fourth floor (“Excuse me, where
are women’s shoes?”). The clerk answered “Fourth floor,” and the
fieldworker walked around a corner to make notations. This methodology
resulted in hundreds of tokens of the words “fourth floor” in both casual and
emphatic speech (Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 Percent r-fulness in three NYC department stores, rapid and anonymous data
collection
Source: Adapted from Labov (1966), Fowler (1986)
Labov was able to pinpoint the effects of social class, prestige, style,
gender, age, and other factors on the distribution of this data. The more