In the 1970s, Feagin undertook a similar investigation in Anniston,
Alabama, and found a similar change in progress. Northerners tend to think
of all Southerners as r-less, but Feagin established that postvocalic (r) was
creeping in quite steadily. Another ten years provided enough data and
perspective for her to conclude that the South was moving from r-less to r-
ful in only three generations (Feagin 1990).
Elliott also found a great deal of stereotyping in the retention or deletion
of (r), often within the same film for the same actress. For example, Patty
Duke’s character in Valley of the Dolls starts out as a prototypical good girl,
at which point she is r-less no more than 9 percent of the time; by the end of
the movie she is a drug addict with no hope, and her r-less rate has risen to
29 percent (ibid.: 121–122). It is no surprise that an actor manipulates
language in the process of trying to establish character, a topic that will
come up again in the discussion of accent in children’s animated film.
So there is a wide range of factors that play a role in this change in
progress. In addition to place, age is a strong predictor – the younger the
speaker, the more postvocalic r-ful; so does education, so that people who
have more formal education trend toward restoring (r). Race is more
relevant still, as Labov (1972b) reports, “all other things being equal,
African-American ethnicity lowers the frequency of (r) constriction by 32
percent.”
African Americans tend to be r-less wherever they live, whether in Iowa
(where postvocalic (r) is solid and categorical) or Alabama. Figure 2.5
indicates that New Hampshire is becoming more r-ful, while both Anglos
and African Americans in Boston are resisting such a change. African
Americans are more persistently r-less than Anglos. The two groups’
resistance to r-fulness may look similar on the surface, but the underlying
motivations are certainly different.