I have mentioned that much of the Eastern New England accent, which sounds its O and other low vowels a little differently while dropping some r’s and adding others, still persists in NH, though much weakened. The dropped-r (officially called non-rhoticity) in cards, or marked is more subtle now, but I don't believe the added-r at the end of words has diminished at all. Many feminine names end in –a,* which in NH can still be pronounced –er, as in Christiner, Aniter, Wander, Rebeccer. The –a sound is more likely to be retained after a soft consonant, so it is rarer to hear Carler or Sarer (though they do occur). Lots of medical words end with the –a sound as well, created out of Greek and Latin roots, so here at the hospital one hears nurses saying nausear(sounds like NAW-zhur, not NAH-zee-ur), dystonier, dyslexier.
Yet strongest of all is idear. People who add the R onto no other words might retain it there. I don’t believe accents are actually going away, as is commonly claimed. (It sounds plausible, but there’s actually not much evidence for it. Most accents show up in vowels - which already have a lot of variety no matter long you put Hooked On Phonics on continuous loop in your kid’s ipod - and in dropped consonants, which already occur so often in English that they hardly raise a red flag when a particular region has variants.) But even if it is true, and Americans are homogenizing to the speech of Medina, Ohio, idear will still be around in 50 years.
*-a is a frequent feminine ending worldwide, which is part of Ruhlen’s argument for common origin of all languages.
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