Sociolinguistics 5, Exercise 2: Labov's /r/

Department stores (Wikipedia, Sociolinguistic prestige): at Saks, Macy's and
S. Klein, employees' use of word-final /r/ in "fourth floor" tracked store
status. Saks employees pronounced /r/ most often. So /r/ had become a
prestige marker in New York City by 1966.

Hypercorrection (Wikipedia, Hypercorrection): speakers pronounced the "r" in
words like hard more often when speaking carefully. Lower-middle-class
speakers used more rhotic pronunciation than upper-middle-class speakers,
apparently trying to imitate them but overproducing the noticeable r-sound.
In the word-list version, lower-class speakers who were monitoring their
speech added /r/ to words that had none.

Difference: pronouncing /r/ where it belongs is following the prestige norm
(a high rate in words with historical r). Overapplying it is hypercorrection:
using the rule in places where the standard has none.