Figure 2.5 Percent postvocalic r maintenance by age, location, and race
Source: Adapted from Naggy and Irwin (2010)
This may be seen as following from many different factors, but the most
important is likely the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1940, roughly
1.5 million African Americans fled to the urban areas of the North to escape
poverty and racism. After the interruption of World War II, another 1.5
million African Americans migrated North between 1940 and 1950, a trend
that continued until about 1970.^4 For communities of African Americans
recently who migrated from, for example, rural South Carolina to take up
work in Detroit, postvocalic r-lessness was most likely a way to emphasize
their solidarity and common history.
Recently linguists have argued for a more anthropological approach to the
study of this kind of variation. Michael Silverstein (2003) proposed the
concept of indexical order as an alternate way of studying language
variation and change. Rather than assigning precise meanings to any given
variable, for example, (r) deletion, it is more revealing and potentially more
useful to think of variables as existing within a pool or field of potential
meanings. Eckert (2008) has called this a “constellation of ideologically
related meaning ... The field is fluid, and each new activation has the
potential to change the field by building on ideological connections.” In a
traditional sociolinguistic study, data would be analyzed quantitatively and