Boston accent

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, though some uniquely local vocabulary appears only around Boston. Some traditional Boston accent characteristics may be retreating, particularly among younger residents, but Linguist William Labov claims that, in the twenty-first century, the accent remains relatively stable, though subsequent research suggests it is increasingly becoming limited to the historically Irish-American neighborhood of South Boston.
Phonological characteristics.
Boston accents typically have the cot-caught merger. This means that instead of merging the historical "short "o"" sound (as in "lot") with the "broad "a"" (as in "father") like most other American accents, the Boston accent merges it with the "aw" sound as in "paw". Thus, "lot", "paw", "caught", "cot", "law", "wand", "rock", "talk", "doll", "wall", etc. all are pronounced with the same open back (often) rounded vowel , which contrasts with the of "father" and "spa". So while the word "dark" has no in many Boston accents, it remains distinct from "dock" because it belongs to the – class of words versus the –– one: "dark" vs. "dock" . While New York accents have for "paw" and for "lot" and Standard British accents have a similar distinction ( versus ), Boston accents only have one merged phoneme here for both: .
In general, Eastern New England accents have a "short "a"" vowel , as in "cat" and "rat", that is extremely tensed towards when it precedes a nasal consonant; thus, "man" is and "planet" is . 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 -raising system is not shared with British or New York City accents. In addition to raising before nasals, Bostonians (unlike nearby New Hampshirites, for example) also tend to somewhat "raise" or "break" the "short "a"" sound the most before voiceless fricatives (followed by voiced stops, laterals, voiceless stops, and voiced fricatives), so that words like "half", "bath", and "glass" become , and , respectively. 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 class (see "Declining characteristics" below). The raised may overlap with the non-rhotic realization of as .
Boston accents make a greater variety of distinctions between short and long vowels before medial than many other modern American accents do: "hurry" and "furry" ; and "mirror" and "nearer" , though some of these distinctions are somewhat endangered as people under 40 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 has lost them entirely.
The nuclei of the diphthongs and may be raised to something like 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 and (in the words "go" and "goo") are significantly less fronted than in many American accents. also is not particularly fronted and may be diphthongized to approximately or .
Speakers of the more deeply urban varieties of the Boston accent may realize the English dental fricatives as the dental stops , giving rise to a phonemic distinction between dental and alveolar stops; thus, "those" may sound closer to "doze".
Non-rhoticity.
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. Non-rhoticity means the phoneme does not appear in coda position (where in English phonotactics it must precede other consonants, see English phonology - coda), as in most dialects of English in England and Australia; "card" therefore becomes "cahd" and "color" "culluh". Words such as "weird" and "square" feature centering diphthongs, which correspond to the sequences of close and mid vowels + in rhotic AmE. The phonemicity of the centering diphthongs depends on a speaker's rhoticity.
A famous example of non-rhoticity (plus a fronted vowel) is "Park the car in Harvard Yard", pronounced , or as if spelled "pahk the cah(r) in Hahvud Yahd". Note that the "r" in "car" would usually be pronounced in this case, because the following word begins with a vowel.
The Boston accent possesses both linking R and intrusive R: That is to say, an will not be lost at the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel, and indeed an 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 .
Declining features.
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. In Boston, "horse" has the phoneme; in other words, the accent features the –– merger, so that "tort", "tot" and "taught" are phonemically all . It is distinct from the vowel, as in "hoarse" . Other words fall into these distinct classes too, like "for" vs. "four": vs. , mirroring RP as spoken at the beginning of the 20th century (though it had a distinct vowel). This distinction is rapidly fading out of currency (with the words belonging to the class being transferred over to the class, undoing the merger of with –), as it is in almost all regions of North America that still make it. For rhotic speakers, both and are + : (phonetically closer to ). The remaining centering diphthongs also disappear in the rhotic variety, so that "near", "cure" and "square" are (the last one is phonetically ) instead of the traditional .
A feature that Boston speakers once shared with Received Pronunciation, though now uncommon, is the "broad "a"" of the lexical set of words, making a distinction from the set (). In particular words that in other American accents have the "short "a"" pronounced as , that vowel was replaced in the nineteenth century (if not earlier and often sporadically by speakers as far back as the late eighteenth century) with : thus, "half" as and "bath" as . 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 occurring in speakers born from about 1930 to 1950 (and first documented as a decline in 1977). Boston speakers born before about 1930 used this broad "a" in the words "after", "ask", "aunt", "bath", "calf", "can't", "glass", "half", "laugh", "pasture", "path", and perhaps other words, and born from about 1930 to 1950 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. ), for example, in "craft", "bad", "math", etc.) with this same set of words and, variably, other instances of short "a" too. 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.
In popular culture.
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'".
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". 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 reference to the former US Senator Ted Kennedy. 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".
In "The Heat", the family of Shannon Mullins all speak with the Boston accent and confusion arises from the pronunciation of the word "narc" as "nahk" . 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.
Lexicon.
Some words most famously associated with the Boston area are:
Many words common to Boston are also common throughout the New England dialects: "blinkers" for "automobile turn signals" (the Massachusetts Department of Transportation even has signs reminding motorists, with Boston phonetic spelling, to "Use Yah Blinkah"), "packie" (or "package store") for "liquor store", and "rotary" for "traffic circle" (these full-speed circular intersections being common in Greater Boston).