American Language Supplement 2 (2012)
“THE CONSONANTS “In London and some parts of the South [of England],” said R. J. Lloyd in 1894, “the r following a vowel at the end of the word or syllable has disappeared, but there is no other part of the English-speaking world except Eastern New England where this is quite the case.”2 Lloyd might have excepted also the Tidewater South, but everywhere else in the United States, including even the Hudson Valley area, the r is usually sounded. The late C. H. Grandgent of Harvard (1862–1939) once... estimated that, in the West, it appears before consonants, as in card, north, part and farm, 81 times out of 100, in the Middle States 64 times, in New England 36 times, and in the South 24 times.3 Bernard Bloch, one of the collaborators in the Linguistic Atlas of New England, has since shown that it is now conquering even New England. In the Western third of the area he has found it prevailing in more than 75% of the cases, and even within the Boston territory there are speechislands in which it is clearly sounded.MoreLess
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