Boston Brahmin Accent

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.

Eastern New England English, here including Rhode Island English, is classically associated with sound patterns such as: non-rhoticity, or dropping ''r'' when not before a vowel; both variants of Canadian raising, including a fairly back starting position of the vowel (as in ); and some variation of the vowel distinctions, the marry–merry distinction, or both. Eastern New England (excluding Rhode Island) is also nationally recognized for its highly front vowel.

As of the 21st century, certain traditional characteristics are declining due to many younger Eastern New Englanders avoiding them, particularly non-rhoticity and the aforementioned vowel distinctions, which they tend to perceive as old-fashioned, overly rural-sounding, or even overly urban-sounding with regard to Boston. New Hampshire speakers on the whole are particularly well documented as retreating from these older Eastern New England features since the mid-20th century onwards.Platt, Melanie, "Do you "park your car" or "pahk your cah''?: The Changing Dialect of Southern New Hampshire" (2015). Inquiry Journal 2015. 5. http://scholars.unh.edu/inquiry_2015/5Nagy, Naomi (2001). " 'Live Free or Die' as a Linguistic Principle". ''American Speech'', Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp. 30-41.

Overview of phonology

The sound system of traditional Eastern New England English includes:
*Non-rhoticity: The ''r'' sound may be "dropped" or "silent" if not before a vowel; therefore, in words like ''car'', ''letter'', ''horse'', ''poor'', etc. The feature is retreating and is not found in many younger speakers, for example, in virtually no speakers born since the mid-20th century in southeastern New Hampshire.
** Linking and intrusive ''r'': The non-rhotic ''r'' may be pronounced after all if it is followed by a vowel, even a vowel that begins the next word in the sentence. Also, any word that ends in /ə/ (as in ''Cuba''), /ɑ/ (as in ''spa''), or /ɔ/ (as in ''law'') can be followed by an unwritten ''r'' sound when followed by a vowel sound in the next word: thus, ''law and public safety'' sounds like ''Lauren public safety''.
*Backing of : The vowel of ''goose'', ''rude'', ''coup'', etc. remains pronounced relatively far back in the mouth.
*Possible lack of the horse–hoarse merger: The vowel of words like ''war'' versus ''wore'', or ''morning'' versus ''mourning'', are mostly produced either very close or the same in Eastern New England; however, as of the early 2000s, such vowels may still be pronounced differently by some Eastern New England speakers, especially in Maine. Conversely, the merger of the vowels is largely complete elsewhere in the United States.
*Full Canadian raising: The tongue is raised in the first element of the gliding vowel as well as whenever either appears before a voiceless consonant. Therefore, a word like ''house'' is often .
*Backing of : The vowel of ''gouge'', ''loud'', ''town'', ''power'', etc. has a relatively back-of-mouth starting position: thus, something like .
*Possible lack of the Mary–marry–merry mergers: Before intervocalic , the vowels ( in rhotic varieties), and (as in ''Mary'', ''marry'', and ''merry'') are distinguished from one another, particularly in Southeastern New England (namely Rhode Island), which is also true in the New York City area and Britain. However, recent studies have shown that there is an emerging tendency in Northeastern New England (Boston, for example) to merge them, as in most other American accents.
* "Short ''a''" nasal system: The "short ''a''" sound may be tensed in various environments, though most severely before a nasal consonant; therefore, in words like ''man'', ''clam'', ''Annie'', etc.
*Fronting of /: The vowel of words like ''palm'', ''spa'', ''car'', ''park'', etc. is pronounced farther to the front of the vocal tract than in most other dialects, so that ''car'', for example, is something like . This, plus non-rhoticity, is often associated with the shibboleth "Park the car in Harvard yard." This fronting is seldom reported in Rhode Island, in which ''car'' is more often backed .

Overview of vocabulary and grammatical features

Some words or phrases most famously or strongly associated with Eastern New England are:
*''bang'': to make a sudden or decisive turn while driving; only used in certain phrases: "bang a left", "bang a right", or "bang a U-ie".
*''bubbler'' or ''water bubbler'': drinking fountain. This term is also used in Wisconsin and Australia.
*'' bulkie'': a thick white-bread roll, similar to a hamburger bun or kaiser roll
*''frappe'' : a thick beverage made of milk and ice cream, i.e. a milkshake in most other places (whereas "milkshake" in Boston traditionally means flavored milk). A synonym common only in Rhode Island is ''cabinet''.
*''hoodsie'': a small disposable cup of ice cream, the kind that comes with a flat wooden spoon (from HP Hood, the dairy that sells them and elsewhere sometimes known as a "dixie cup".) A secondary meaning (very offensive slang) is "promiscuous teenaged girl".Boston To English Dictionary
at CelebrateBoston.com
*''jimmies'': sprinkles; to some, particularly chocolate sprinkles. The term is also common in the Philadelphia area.
*''pissa(h)'': "great" or "amazing", either realistically or sarcastically. This is from the word "pisser" with a Boston accent, but used as an adjective. Occasionally combined with "wicked" to yield "wicked pissah".
*''scrod'': any small whitefish, such as cod or haddock, used in cooking
*''"So don't I"'': "so do I" or "I do too".
*''spa'': a neighborhood convenience store that has a soda fountain and often sells sandwiches.
*''tonic'' : any sweet, carbonated soft drink (chiefly confined to Boston), otherwise known as "soda" in the region or "pop" elsewhere; not the same as tonic water.
*''whiffle'': a crew cut or male haircut done with electric clippers.
*''wicked'': "very" or "super", used as an adverb or intensifier (such as "That hockey game was wicked good!" or "Ugh, that guy is wicked slow").
Many words common to Boston are also common throughout New England dialects: ''grinder'' for "submarine sandwich" (also, '' spuckie'' or ''spuky'' in East Boston), ''packie'' (or ''package store'') for "liquor store", ''rotary'' for "traffic circle" (these full-speed circular intersections being common in Greater Boston), and ''yous'' as the working-class plural form of "you" (a word found throughout the urban Northeast with many spelling variants).Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder. 2003
The Harvard Dialect Survey
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department. ''Cellar'', whose definition may have slight nuances nationwide, can also be a simple synonym for ''basement'' in Eastern New England and Massachusetts generally. In this same area, related expressions like ''down the cellar'' or even ''down-cellar'' are distinctive, meaning "down to the basement" or "down in the basement" (as in "She's getting some boxes down-cellar").

Northeastern New England English

Northeastern New England English, popularly recognized as a Boston or Maine accent, in addition to all the above phonological features, further includes the merger of the vowel in ''cot'' and ''caught'' to , often with a slightly rounded quality, but a resistance to the merger of the vowels in ''father'' versus ''bother'', a merger that is otherwise common throughout North America. Also, for speakers born before 1950, the words ''half'' and ''pass'' (and, before World War II, also ''ask'' and ''can't'') are pronounced with a " broad ''a''," like in ''spa'': and .

Boston

Boston, Massachusetts is the birthplace and most famous site of Eastern New England English. Historically, a Northeastern type of New England English spread from metropolitan Boston into metropolitan Worcester, the bulk of New Hampshire, and central and coastal Maine. Boston speech also originated many slang and uniquely local terms that have since spread throughout Massachusetts and Eastern New England. Although mostly non-rhotic, the modern Boston accent typically pronounces the ''r'' sound in the vowel, , as in ''bird'', ''learn'', ''turkey'', ''world'', etc.

Maine

A traditional Maine accent, the closest remnant today to a more widespread 19th-century Yankee regional accent, includes the phonology mentioned above, plus the loss of the phonemic status of (as in ''there''), (as in ''here''), and (as in ''more'') all of which are broken into two syllables (, respectively): ''they-uh'', ''hee-yuh'', and ''moh-uh''; some distinct vocabulary is also used in this accent. Maine is one of the last American regions to resist the horse–hoarse merger. This continued resistance was verified by some speakers in a 2006 study of Bangor and Portland, Maine, yet contradicted by a 2013 study that reported the merger as embraced by Portland speakers "of all ages". The horse–hoarse separation means that words like ''war'' and ''wore'' may sound different: ''war'' rhyming with ''law'' , and ''wore'' rhyming with ''boa'' . Unlike the Boston accent, this traditional Maine accent may be non-rhotic entirely: even in the pronunciation of as .

Cultivated New England

A cultivated New England accent, sometimes known as a "Boston Brahmin accent" within Boston, was once associated with members of wealthy New England families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; it is now essentially extinct. Notable example speakers included many members of the Kennedy family born in this time period, including President John F. Kennedy, whose accent is not an ordinary Boston accent so much as a "tony Harvard accent". This accent retained an older cot–caught distinction, a less fronted vowel in some speakers, non-rhotic , and a split ( versus ). This accent corresponds in its time-frame and in much of its sound with a cultivated transatlantic accent promoted in prestigious northeastern boarding schools and theatrical elocution courses in the same era.Knight, Dudley. "Standard Speech". In: Hampton, Marian E. & Barbara Acker (eds.) (1997). ''The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice.'' Hal Leonard Corporation. pp. 160.

Notable speakers of Northeastern New England English

* Ken Beatrice – "... the New England native with the pronounced Boston accent"
* Bill Burr — "the comic's wicked Boston accent"
* Calvin Coolidge – "r-less New Englander"Metcalf, A. (2004). ''Presidential Voices. Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush''. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. pp. 150.
* Lenny Clarke – "a Cambridge-raised verbal machine gun with a raspy Boston accent"
* Nick Di Paolo – "thick Boston accent"
*John F. Kennedy – "his tony Harvard accent"
* Edward "Ted" Kennedy – "No one else from Boston, or anywhere in New England, has imprinted the regional accent on the national consciousness as Senator Kennedy did."
* Mel King – "he has the soft Rs of a deep Boston accent"
* Lyndon LaRouche – "a cultivated New England accent"
* Christy Mihos – "speaks unpretentiously in a variation of a Boston accent, and drops the 'g' in words like talking or running."
* Brian and Jim Moran – "The Moran brothers share an unmistakable Massachusetts accent"
* Tom Silva – "New England accent"
* Jermaine Wiggins – "skin as thick as his East Boston accent"

Rhode Island English

The traditional English-language accent of Southeastern New England, popularly known as a Rhode Island accent, is spoken in Rhode Island and the western half of Bristol County, Massachusetts. In addition to all the features mentioned under the phonology section above, the Rhode Island accent also includes a sharp distinction in the vowels of ''Mary'', ''marry'', and ''merry'' and in the vowels in ''cot'' versus ''caught'' , plus the pronunciation of , as in ''car'', far back in the mouth as —these three features making this New England accent noticeably similar to a New York accent. These features are often unlike the modern Northeastern New England (NENE) dialect of Boston, as is Rhode Island's feature of a completed father–bother merger, shared with the rest of the country outside of NENE.Johnson, Daniel Ezra (2010).
Stability and Change Along a Dialect Boundary: The Low Vowels of Southeastern New England
. American Dialect Society 95. p. 100. A few terms are unique only to this area, such as the word ''cabinet'' to mean "milkshake" (particularly, coffee cabinets),Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder. 2003.
What do you call the drink made with milk and ice cream?
" The Harvard Dialect Survey. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Linguistics Department. ''pizza strips'' (Italian tomato pie strips served cold without cheese), and ''coffee milk''.

Notable lifelong native speakers

*John Chafee – a non-rhotic "New England accent"
*Emeril Lagasse
* "Pauly D" DelVecchio – "the thickest Rhode Island accent"
*Henry Giroux
*Spalding Gray – "his demeanor is as flat as his Rhode Island accent"
*Chris Herren – "with a Fall River accent he bellows"
*John Pastore
*Daniel McKee – governor of Rhode Island

French-American Manchester English

An ethnic local accent has been documented among self-identifying French Americans in Manchester, New Hampshire. The accent's most prominent pronunciation features are ''th''-stopping (pronouncing ''thin'' like ''tin'' and ''there'' like ''dare'') and, variably, word-initial ''h''-dropping (so that ''hair'' may sound like ''air'').

See also

*Accent (sociolinguistics)
*Boston accent
*Maine accent
*Western New England English

Notes

References

*
*
* Stanford, James N.; Leddy-Cecere, Thomas A.; Baclawski Jr., Kenneth P. "Farewell To The Founders: Major Dialect Changes Along The East-West New England Border." ''American Speech'' 87.2 (2012): pp. 126–169. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 2 Nov. 2015.
*Stanford, James N.; Severance, Nathan A.; Baclawski Jr., Kenneth P. "Multiple vectors of unidirectional dialect change in eastern New England." ''Language Variation and Change'' (2014) Vol.26 (1), pp. 103–140.
* Stanford, James. 2019. New England English: Large-scale acoustic sociophonetics and dialectology. Oxford University Press. 367 pages.

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