Boston accent
From Academic Kids
The Boston accent is characteristic not only of the city of Boston itself, but more generally of all of eastern Massachusetts. It shares much in common with the accents of New Hampshire and Maine; the three regions are frequently grouped together by sociolinguists under the cover term Eastern New England accent, which, together with New York-New Jersey English, forms a part of Northeastern American English. The internationally best-known user of the Boston accent was probably John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
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Phonological characteristics
All phonetic transcriptions in the IPA; for example:
- how are you? Template:IPA
Deletion of post-vocalic Template:IPA
The traditional Boston accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the phoneme Template:IPA does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no Template:IPA in words like park Template:IPA, car Template:IPA, and Harvard Template:IPA. After high and mid-high vowels, the Template:IPA is replaced by Template:IPA or another neutral central vowel like Template:IPA: weird Template:IPA, square Template:IPA. Similarly, unstressed Template:IPA ("er") is replaced by Template:IPA, Template:IPA, or Template:IPA, as in color Template:IPA.
In the most traditional and old-fashioned Boston accents, what is in other dialects Template:IPA becomes a low back vowel Template:IPA: corn is Template:IPA, pronounced the same or almost the same as con.
For some old-fashioned speakers, stressed Template:IPA as in bird is replaced by Template:IPA (Template:IPA); for many present-day Boston-accent speakers, however, Template:IPA is retained. More speakers lose Template:IPA after other vowels than lose Template:IPA.
The Boston accent possesses both "linking r" and "intrusive r": that is to say, a Template:IPA will not be lost at the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel, and indeed a Template:IPA 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 Template:IPA
Some speakers who are natively non-rhotic or partially non-rhotic attempt to change their accent by restoring Template:IPA to word-final position. For example, on the NPR program Car Talk, hosted by two Bostonian brothers, one host has castigated the other on air for saying Template:IPA instead of Template:IPA. Occasionally such speakers may hypercorrect and "restore" Template:IPA to a word that never originally had it. This leads, for instance, to pronunciations such as Template:IPA and Template:IPA for tuna and idea in isolation.
Vowels
The Boston accent has a highly distinctive system of low vowels, even in speakers who do not drop Template:IPA as described above. Eastern New England is the only region in North America where the distinction between the vowels in words like father and spa on the one hand and words like bother and hot on the other hand is securely maintained: the former contain Template:IPA (Template:IPA, Template:IPA), and the latter Template:IPA (Template:IPA, Template:IPA). This means that even though heart has no Template:IPA, it remains distinct from hot because its vowel quality is different: Template:IPA. By contrast, the accent of New York uses the same vowel in both of these classes: Template:IPA. The Received Pronunciation of England, like Boston English, distinguishes the classes, using Template:IPA in father and Template:IPA in bother.
On the other hand, the Boston accent (unlike the Providence, Rhode Island accent) merges the two classes exemplified by caught and cot: both become Template:IPA. So caught, cot, law, water, rock, talk, doll, and wall all have exactly the same vowel, Template:IPA. For some speakers, as mentioned above, words like corn and horse also have this vowel. By contrast, New York accents have Template:IPA for caught and Template:IPA for cot; Received Pronunciation has Template:IPA and Template:IPA, respectively.
Some older Boston speakers—the ones who have a low vowel in words like corn Template:IPA—maintain a distinction between horse and for on the one hand and hoarse and four on the other hand. The former are in the same class as corn, as Template:IPA and Template:IPA, and the latter are Template:IPA and Template:IPA. This distinction is rapidly fading out of currency, as it is in almost all regions of North America that still make it.
Boston English has a so-called "nasal short-a system". This means that the "short a" vowel Template:IPA as in cat and rat becomes a mid-high front diphthong Template:IPA when it precedes a nasal consonant: thus man is Template:IPA and planet is Template:IPA. Boston shares this system with the accents of the southern part of the Midwest. By contrast, Received Pronunciation uses Template:IPA regardless of whether the next consonant is nasal or not, and New York uses Template:IPA before a nasal at the end of a syllable (Template:IPA) but not before a nasal between two vowels (Template:IPA).
A feature that some Boston English speakers share with Received Pronunciation is the so-called Broad A: in some words that in other accents have Template:IPA, such as half and bath, that vowel is replaced with Template:IPA: Template:IPA, Template:IPA. (In Received Pronunciation, the Broad A vowel is Template:IPA.) Fewer words have the Broad A in Boston English than in Received Pronunciation, and fewer and fewer Boston speakers maintain the Broad A system as time goes on, but it is still noticeable.
Boston accents make a greater variety of distinctions between short and long vowels before medial Template:IPA than many other modern American accents do: Boston accents maintain the distinctions between the vowels in marry Template:IPA, merry Template:IPA, and Mary Template:IPA, hurry Template:IPA and furry Template:IPA, mirror Template:IPA and nearer Template:IPA, though some of these distinctions are somewhat endangered. Boston shares these distinctions with both New York and Received Pronunciation, but the Midwest, for instance, has lost them entirely.
Other phenomena
- It has been said that some speakers from the North Shore sometimes insert Template:IPA before Template:IPA in such words as really Template:IPA, remember Template:IPA.
- Words stressed on antepenultimate (third-from-the-end) syllable (principal, economical, certificate) may have voiced final consonant (marked in bold in the examples above): economical Template:IPA.
Recordings of Boston Accents
- http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english21.html
- http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english79.html
- http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english76.html
References
- McCarthy, John (http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~jjmccart/) (1993). A case of surface constraint violation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics (http://www.utpjournals.com/jour.ihtml?lp=cjl/cjl.html) 38. 169–95.
- George Mason University. The Speech Accent Archive (http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/), 22 September, 2004.
