Part One: Locating your dialect.

• Where did you grow up? List the one or two places where you spent the longest time between the ages of 3 and 15.
 
• If you grew up in the United States: According to Labov, Ash, and Boberg, what dialect of American English, is spoken where you grew up? To answer this, make reference THIS MAP.

  If you grew up within 15 miles of New York City in New Jersey or anywhere in the western half of Long Island, then your answer is "New York City."

 
• If you didn't grow up in the United States, or if your answer to (2) was "New York City," do the following: ask a friend where he/she grew up, and find out what dialect your friend speaks according to Labov, Ash, and Boberg. Keep doing this until you have find someone for whom the answer is not "New York City."

Part Two: R on the street.

When William Labov carried out his department-store study, he was able to determine not only whether or not a person pronounced the <r> in fourth and floor but also-on the basis of the job the person had and where the person worked-something of the person's social status. In the following task, you won't be able to determine social status, but you can find out whether or not speakers are using <r> in this neighborhood.

On the street, ask five strangers questions that elicit a post-vocalic <r>. Do not ask people whom you already know. Optional: Ask the person to repeat the answer by saying "Excuse me?" or "What?" In this way you can more fully replicate Labov's study.

Make sure that the questions are the kind that a person would naturally ask of a stranger. In each case, make note of each relevant word and whether or not the person used <r>. If the person turns out not to be a native speaker of English (you can tell by the person's accent), then you can't use the data. If the person uses more than one word with a post-vocalic r, you should make note of each. In all you need to come up with at least ten tokens, and they need to come from at least five people.

Be sure that the r is not followed by a vowel. So, you're looking for the r in "fourth" or "floor," but not the r in "really" or "terrible" or "four of them." (In preparation, practice saying a relevant word with and without the r.) If the r comes at the end of a word, make sure that the next word doesn't start with an r. So, avoid "Roger Rabbit." The reason to avoid cases like this is that you won't be able to tell whether the person has pronounced the r in "Roger" or not.

Some possible questions:

1. Excuse me, do you have the time? [This will work if the time is roughly "a quarter to" or "X minutes after." If the person answers "nine forty-five," that's OK-there's an r in "forty."]

2. [If you're within a block or two of Tower Records:] "Excuse me, is there a place around here where they sell CD's?" [Note that if the person says "Tower Records," you can't use the r in "Tower"-because of the following r, but you will be able to use the r at the end of Records.]

3. "Where can I get the A train?" [People should direct you to West Fourth Street." If you ask about the No. 6 train, people will direct you to Astor Place.]

4. [In 719 Broadway] "Where is the Linguistics Department?" [Of course, the only plausible person to ask this of may be the security guard; let us hope that not all 56 of you ask him this on the same day!]

Writing up your results:

A. List the questions that you asked.

B. Use this Microsoft Excel TM chart to record the words you got (and the speakers you got them from).

C. On the bottom row of your chart, add up the number of each kind of token you got, i.e.

• how many instances of r-ful speech in a word where the r was medial,
• how many instances of r-less speech in a word where the r was medial,
• how many instances of r-ful speech in a word where the r was final, and
• how many instances of r-less speech in a word where the r was final.

D. Feel free to add any observations about the experiment or about the results.