with the other racial group and even develop newly distinguishing features, which may have further contributed to the sudden mid-20th-century adoption of rhoticity among White Southerners of all classes, despite continuing non-rhoticity among Black Americans. Today, this linguistic divide on the basis of rhoticity (and other accent features) largely persists between Black versus White Southerners. Phonology General Older South The phonologies of early Southern English in the United States were diverse. The following pronunciation features were very generally characteristic of the older Southern region as a whole: Lack of Yod-dropping: Pairs like do and due, or toon and tune, were often distinct in these dialects because words like due, lute, new, etc. historically contained a diphthong similar to (like the you sound in cute or puny). (as England's RP standard pronunciation still does), but Labov et al. report that the only Southern speakers who make a distinction today use a diphthong in such words. They further report that speakers with the distinction are found primarily in North Carolina and northwest South Carolina, and in a corridor extending from Jackson to Tallahassee. For most of the South, this feature began disappearing after World War II. Yod-coalescence: Words like dew were pronounced as "Jew", and Tuesday as "choose day." Wine–whine distinction: distinction between "w" and "wh" in words like "wine" and "whine", "witch and "which", etc. Horse–hoarse distinction: distinction between pairs of words like "horse" and "hoarse", "for" and "four", etc. Rhoticity and non-rhoticity: The pronunciation of the r sound only before or between vowels, but not after vowels, is known as non-rhoticity and was historically associated with the major plantation regions of the South: specifically, the entire Piedmont and most of the South's Atlantic Coast in a band going west towards the Mississippi River, as well as all of the Mississippi Embayment and some of the western Gulf Coastal Plain. This was presumably influenced by the non-rhotic East Anglia and London England pronunciation. Additionally, some older Southern dialects were even "variably non-rhotic in intra-word intervocalic contexts, as in carry [kʰæi]." Rhotic accents of the older Southern dialects, which fully pronounce all historical r sounds, were somewhat rarer and primarily spoken in Appalachia, the eastern Gulf Coastal Plain, and the areas west of the Mississippi Embayment. Palatalization of /k/ and /g/ before /ɑr/: Especially in the older South along the Atlantic Coast, the consonants (as in key or coo) and (as in