New England does not form a single unified dialect region, but rather houses as few as four native varieties of English, with some linguists identifying even more.
Rhode Island, dialectally identified as "Southeastern New England", is sometimes grouped with the Eastern New England dialect region, both by the dialectologists of the mid-20th century and in certain situations by the Atlas of North American English; it shares Eastern New England's traditional non-rhoticity (or "R Dropping").