On Aug. 15, the New York Times ArtsBeat highlighted a study that has discovered a shift in the contours of Vermont’s linguistic landscape.
From the 1700s until the last several decades, the Green Mountains marked a physical line of demarcation between those who drop their R’s (to the east) and those who don’t (to the west). The study, which was published this summer in the journal American Speech, reports an eastward shift of this linguistic fault line, which now falls along the Vermont-New Hampshire border. The study also observes that the nonrhotic R (when VTDigger is pronounced VTDiggah) is nearing extinction among young people.
The original east-west divide is known among linguists as the “Founders’ effect” and it’s attributed to a difference in timing between the settlement of these two regions. European settlers to New Hampshire and eastern Vermont hailed from nonrhotic areas of southeast England; they kept a close cultural connection to this region and continued to drop their R’s. Those who settled on the western side of the Green Mountains arrived later, were less inclined to maintain this connection, and shed their nonrhotic — can’t-get-theah-from-heah — accents.
The New York Times post points out, “The study is not without its political implications. The emergence of the rhotic R in New Hampshire, the researchers suggest, may reflect the spread of the ‘Live Free or Die’ mentality that has crept north as refugees from ‘Taxachusetts’ seek linguistic as well as economic independence from their more liberal brethren to the south.”
