A Boston accent is a local accent of Eastern New England English, native specifically to the city of Boston and its suburbs. Northeastern New England English is classified as traditionally including New Hampshire, Maine, and all of eastern Massachusetts, while some uniquely local vocabulary appears only around Boston. [1] [2] A 2006 study co-authored by William Labov claims that the accent remains relatively stable, [3] though a 2018 study suggests the accent's traditional features may be retreating, particularly among the city's younger residents, and becoming increasingly confined to the historically Irish-American neighborhood of South Boston. [4]
Front | Central | Back | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
lax | tense | lax | tense | lax | tense | |
Close | ɪ | i | ʊ | u | ||
Mid | ɛ | eɪ | ə | ʌ | oʊ | |
Open | æ | a | ɒ | |||
Diphthongs | aɪ ɔɪ aʊ (ɪə ʊə ɛə oə) |
Boston accents typically have the cot-caught merger but not the father-bother merger. This means that instead of merging the historical "short o" sound (as in LOT) with the "broad a" (as in PALM) like most other American accents, the Boston accent merges it with the "aw" vowel (as in THOUGHT). Thus, lot, paw, caught, cot, law, wand, rock, talk, doll, wall, etc. all are pronounced with the same open back (often) rounded vowel [ ɒ ] , while keeping the broad a sound distinct: [ a ] , as in father, spa, and dark. So, even though the word dark has no /r/ in many Boston accents, it remains pronounced differently from dock because it belongs to Boston's START–PALM class of words versus the LOT–THOUGHT one: dark/dak/ versus dock/dɒk/. [5] [ page needed ] Thus, while New York accents have /ɔ/ for paw and /ɑ/ for lot, and Standard British accents have a similar distinction (/ɔː/ versus /ɒ/), Boston accents only have one merged phoneme for both: /ɒ/.
In general, Eastern New England accents have a "short a" vowel /æ/, as in TRAP, that is extremely tensed towards [eə] when it precedes a nasal consonant; thus, man is [meən] and planet is [ˈpʰleənɪʔ]. Boston shares this system with some of the American Midwest and most of the West, though the raising in Boston tends to be more extreme. This type of modern General American /æ/-raising system is simpler than the systems of British or New York City accents. However, elements of a more complex pattern exist for some Boston speakers; in addition to raising before nasals, Bostonians (unlike nearby New Hampshirites, for example) may also "raise" or "break" the "short a" sound before other types of consonants too: primarily the most strongly before voiceless fricatives, followed by voiced stops, laterals, voiceless stops, and voiced fricatives, so that words like half, bath, and glass become [hɛəf], [bɛəθ] and [ɡlɛəs], respectively. [6] This trend began around the early-mid to mid-twentieth century, replacing the older Boston accent's London-like "broad a" system, in which those same words are transferred over to the PALM class /a/(). [7] The raised [ɛə] may overlap with the non-rhotic realization of SQUARE as [ɛə].
Boston accents make a greater variety of distinctions between short and long vowels before medial /r/ than many other modern American accents do: hurry/ˈhʌri/ and furry/ˈfəri/; and mirror/ˈmɪrə/ and nearer/ˈnɪərə/, though some of these distinctions are somewhat endangered as people under 40[ clarification needed ] in neighboring New Hampshire and Maine have lost them. In this case, Boston shares these distinctions with both New York and British accents, whereas other American accents, like in the Midwest, have lost them entirely.
The nuclei of the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ (PRICE and MOUTH. respectively) may be raised to something like [ɐ] before voiceless consonants: thus write has a higher vowel than ride and lout has a higher vowel than loud. This phenomenon, more famously associated with Canadian accents, is known by linguists as Canadian raising.
The nuclei of /oʊ/ and /u/ (in GOAT and GOOSE) are significantly less fronted than in many other American accents. The latter may be diphthongized to [ʊu] or [ɵu].
The weak vowel merger is traditionally absent. This makes Lenin/ˈlɛnɪn/ distinct from Lennon/ˈlɛnən/. [8]
Speakers of the more deeply urban varieties of the Boston accent may realize the English dental fricatives /θ,ð/ as the dental stops [t̪,d̪], giving rise to a phonemic distinction between dental and alveolar stops; thus, those may sound closer to doze.
The traditional Boston accent is widely known for being non-rhotic (or "r-dropping"), particularly before the mid-20th century. Recent studies have shown that younger speakers use more of a rhotic (or r-ful) accent than older speakers. [9] This goes for black Bostonians as well. [10] Non-rhoticity means that the phoneme /r/ does not appear in coda position , as in most dialects of English in England and Australia; card therefore becomes /kad/ "cahd" and color/ˈkʌlə/ "culluh". Words such as weird/wɪəd/ and square/skwɛə/ feature centering diphthongs, which correspond to the sequences of close and mid vowels + /r/ in rhotic AmE. The phonemicity of the centering diphthongs /ɪə,ʊə,ɛə,oə/ depends on a speaker's rhoticity. Also, the stressed sequence /ɜr/ inside a closed syllable, as in NURSE, is most likely to take on a rhotic [ɝ] pronunciation among Bostonians. [9] [11]
A famous example of non-rhoticity (plus a fronted START vowel) is "Park your car in Harvard Yard", pronounced [pʰakjəˈkʰaɹ‿ɪnˌhavədˈjad], or as if spelled "pahk yah cah(r) in Hahvud Yahd". [12] [13] The r in car would usually be pronounced in this case, because the Boston accent possesses both linking R and intrusive R: an /r/ will not be lost at the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel, and an /r/ will be inserted after a word ending with a central or low vowel if the next word begins with a vowel: the tuner is and the tuna is are both /ðəˈtunər‿ɪz/. This example has been used since at least 1946, to the point where some locals find requests to say the phrase annoying. [14] Actual parking in Harvard Yard is prohibited, except by permission in rare cases for loading and unloading, contractors, or people needing accessible transport directly to Harvard Memorial Church. [14]
Many characteristics of the Boston accent may be retreating, particularly among younger residents. In the most old-fashioned of Boston accents, there may be a lingering resistance to the horse–hoarse merger, so that horse has the pure vowel /ɒ/, while hoarse has the centering diphthong /oə/; this can potentially cause the NORTH–LOT–THOUGHT merger, so that tort, tot and taught are phonemically all /tɒt/. The result is that, for an older Boston accent, the NORTH–LOT–THOUGHT vowel is distinct from the FORCE vowel. Another two example words that would traditionally be distinguished, thus, are for/fɒ/ versus four/foə/. This distinction was rapidly fading out of currency in the second half of the 20th century with the words belonging to the NORTH class being transferred over to the FORCE class, undoing the merger of NORTH with LOT–THOUGHT, as it is in almost all regions of North America that still make it. For non-rhotic speakers, the modern-day situation in Boston is that both horse and hoarse, as well as both for and four, take the centering diphthong /oə/.
A feature that Boston speakers once shared with Britain's Received Pronunciation, though now uncommon in Boston, is the "broad a" of the BATH lexical set of words, making a distinction from the TRAP set ( ). In particular words that in other American accents have the "short a" pronounced as /æ/, that vowel was replaced in the nineteenth century (if not earlier and often sporadically by speakers as far back as the late eighteenth century) [15] with /a/: thus, half as /haf/ and bath as /baθ/. [16] Fewer words have the broad a in Boston English than in the London accents, and fewer and fewer Boston speakers maintain the broad a system as time goes on, with its transition into a decline first occurring in speakers born from about 1930 to 1950 (and first documented as a decline in 1977). [7] Boston speakers born before about 1930 used this broad a in after, ask, aunt, bath, calf, can't, glass, half, laugh, pasture, path, and other words, while those born from about 1930 to 1950 normally use it only in aunt, calf, half, laugh, and pass. Speakers born since 1950 typically have no broad a whatsoever and, instead, slight /æ/ raising (i.e. [ɛə] in craft, bad, math, etc.) [16] with this same set of words and, variably, other instances of short a too. [16] Only aunt maintains the broad a sound in even the youngest speakers, though this one word is a common exception throughout all of the Northeastern U.S. Broad a in aunt is also heard by occasional speakers throughout Anglophone North America; it is quite commonly heard in African American speech as well.
Although not all Boston-area speakers are non-rhotic, non-rhoticity remains the feature most widely associated with the region. As a result, it is frequently the subject of humor about Boston, as in comedian Jon Stewart joking in his book America that, although John Adams drafted the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, "delegates from his state refused to ratify the letter 'R'". [17]
Being conspicuous and easily identifiable as regional, Boston accents are routinely featured by actors in films set in Boston, particularly for working-class white characters, such as in Good Will Hunting , Mystic River , The Departed , Manchester by the Sea , The Town , Ted , The Fighter , and Black Mass . [18] [19] Television series based within a Boston setting such as Boston Public and Cheers have featured the accent. Simpsons character Mayor Quimby talks with an exaggerated Boston accent as a reference to the former US Senator Ted Kennedy. [20] Television comedy sketches have featured the accent, including "The Boston Teens" and "Dunkin Donuts" on Saturday Night Live , as well as "Boston Accent Trailer" on Late Night with Seth Meyers . [18]
In The Heat , the family members of Shannon Mullins all speak with the Boston accent, and confusion arises from the pronunciation of the word narc as nahk/nak/. In the video game Team Fortress 2 , the character Scout, who is himself a Boston native, talks with a distinct Boston accent, although it sometimes lapses into a Brooklyn accent.
American English (AmE), sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce; and an official language of most U.S. states. Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide.
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American, is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the North Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Other scholars prefer the term Standard American English.
The phonology of the open back vowels of the English language has undergone changes both overall and with regional variations, through Old and Middle English to the present. The sounds heard in modern English were significantly influenced by the Great Vowel Shift, as well as more recent developments in some dialects such as the cot–caught merger.
Eastern New England English, historically known as the Yankee dialect since at least the 19th century, is the traditional regional dialect of Maine, New Hampshire, and the eastern half of Massachusetts. Features of this variety once spanned an even larger dialect area of New England, for example, including the eastern halves of Vermont and Connecticut for those born as late as the early twentieth century. Studies vary as to whether the unique dialect of Rhode Island technically falls within the Eastern New England dialect region.
There are a variety of pronunciations in Modern English and in historical forms of the language for words spelled with the letter ⟨a⟩. Most of these go back to the low vowel of earlier Middle English, which later developed both long and short forms. The sound of the long vowel was altered in the Great Vowel Shift, but later a new long A developed which was not subject to the shift. These processes have produced the main four pronunciations of ⟨a⟩ in present-day English: those found in the words trap, face, father and square. Separate developments have produced additional pronunciations in words like wash, talk and comma.
In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.
Philadelphia English or Delaware Valley English is a variety or dialect of American English native to Philadelphia and extending into Philadelphia's metropolitan area throughout the Delaware Valley, including southeastern Pennsylvania, all of South Jersey, counties of northern Delaware, and the northern Eastern Shore of Maryland. Aside from Philadelphia and the surrounding counties and arguably Baltimore, the dialect is spoken in places such as Reading, Camden, Atlantic City, Wilmington, Vineland, and Dover. Philadelphia English is one of the best-studied types of English, as Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania is the home institution of pioneering sociolinguist William Labov. Philadelphia English shares certain features with New York City English and Midland American English, although it remains a distinct dialect of its own. Philadelphia and Baltimore accents together fall under what Labov describes as a single Mid-Atlantic regional dialect.
North American English regional phonology is the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken North American English —what are commonly known simply as "regional accents". Though studies of regional dialects can be based on multiple characteristics, often including characteristics that are phonemic, phonetic, lexical (vocabulary-based), and syntactic (grammar-based), this article focuses only on the former two items. North American English includes American English, which has several highly developed and distinct regional varieties, along with the closely related Canadian English, which is more homogeneous geographically. American English and Canadian English have more in common with each other than with varieties of English outside North America.
Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
In the history of English phonology, there have been many diachronic sound changes affecting vowels, especially involving phonemic splits and mergers.
New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping". Accordingly, one linguistic division of New England is into Eastern versus Western New England English, as defined in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE further argues for a division between Northern versus Southern New England English, especially on the basis of the cot–caught merger and fronting. The ANAE also categorizes the strongest differentiated New England accents into four combinations of the above dichotomies, simply defined as follows:
Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.
English diphthongs have undergone many changes since the Old and Middle English periods. The sound changes discussed here involved at least one phoneme which historically was a diphthong.
Older Southern American English is a diverse set of American English dialects of the Southern United States spoken most widely up until the American Civil War of the 1860s, before gradually transforming among its White speakers, first, by the turn of the 20th century, and, again, following the Great Depression, World War II, and, finally, the Civil Rights Movement. By the mid-20th century, among White Southerners, these local dialects had largely consolidated into, or been replaced by, a more regionally unified Southern American English. Meanwhile, among Black Southerners, these dialects transformed into a fairly stable African-American Vernacular English, now spoken nationwide among Black people. Certain features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, like non-rhoticity, though typically only among Black speakers or among very localized White speakers.
Northern American English or Northern U.S. English is a class of historically related American English dialects, spoken by predominantly white Americans, in much of the Great Lakes region and some of the Northeast region within the United States. The North as a superdialect region is best documented by the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE) in the greater metropolitan areas of Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, Western and Central New York, Northwestern New Jersey, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Northern Ohio, Northern Indiana, Northern Illinois, Northeastern Nebraska, and Eastern South Dakota, plus among certain demographics or areas within Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and New York's Hudson Valley. The ANAE describes that the North, at its core, consists of the Inland Northern dialect and Southwestern New England dialect.
The sound system of New York City English is popularly known as a New York accent. The New York metropolitan accent is one of the most recognizable accents of the United States, largely due to its popular stereotypes and portrayal in radio, film, and television. Several other common names exist for the accent that associate it with more specific locations in the New York City area, such as Bronx accent, Brooklyn accent, Queens accent, Long Island accent, North Jersey accent, etc.; however, no research has demonstrated significant linguistic differences between these locations.
The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
Standard Canadian English is the largely homogeneous variety of Canadian English that is spoken particularly across Ontario and Western Canada, as well as throughout Canada among urban middle-class speakers from English-speaking families, excluding the regional dialects of Atlantic Canadian English. Canadian English has a mostly uniform phonology and much less dialectal diversity than neighbouring American English. In particular, Standard Canadian English is defined by the cot–caught merger to and an accompanying chain shift of vowel sounds, which is called the Canadian Shift. A subset of the dialect geographically at its central core, excluding British Columbia to the west and everything east of Montreal, has been called Inland Canadian English. It is further defined by both of the phenomena that are known as Canadian raising : the production of and with back starting points in the mouth and the production of with a front starting point and very little glide that is almost in the Canadian Prairies.
Western New England English refers to the varieties of New England English native to Vermont, Connecticut, and the western half of Massachusetts; New York State's Hudson Valley also aligns to this classification. Sound patterns historically associated with Western New England English include the features of rhoticity, the horse–hoarse merger, and the father–bother merger, none of which are features traditionally shared in neighboring Eastern New England English. The status of the cot–caught merger in Western New England is inconsistent, being complete in the north of this dialect region (Vermont), but incomplete or absent in the south, with a "cot–caught approximation" in the middle area.
In the sociolinguistics of the English language, raising or short-a raising is a phenomenon by which the "short a" vowel, the TRAP/BATH vowel, is pronounced with a raising of the tongue. In most American and many Canadian English accents, raising is specifically tensing: a combination of greater raising, fronting, lengthening, and gliding that occurs only in certain phonological environments or certain words. The most common context for tensing throughout North American English, regardless of dialect, is when this vowel appears before a nasal consonant.