A study of the factors affecting the burring of word-initial /r/ in a small English village found variability in the temporal, spatial, social, sexual, and phonic aspects of usage. Six categories of burrers are distinguished according to their speech habits. The evidence points to an ongoing socially and phonetically conditioned change in the village with stress as the underlying factor: the route of the innovation is set by the phoneme in stressed syllables as opposed to unstressed syllables, and the sound change appears to be proceeding gradually through the population. The change is also lexically gradual, with only some lexical items affected. (MSE)