Rhotic and non-rhotic English in the Early Republic. Social and geographical distribution

This article discusses the distribution of rhotic and non-rhotic English in the United States between 1770 and 1849. For the study, documents written by individuals belonging to different social classes were inspected to identify misspellings that deviated from conventional spelling regarding ‹r› or the previous vowel. The results show that during the period ‹r› elision was never the most frequent occurrence. In fact, the results indicate that it was the quality of the previous vowel that underwent significant oscillations. Regarding the distribution of rhotic and non-rhotic English, the results evidence that r-lessness happened mostly in states that are predominantly non-rhotic today. In terms of social variation, the results suggest there was a tendency for the middle classes to produce more non-rhotic misspellings than other classes. The investigation also reveals that there might have been a rapid expansion of non-rhotic English after 1850.