Boston accent
From Free net encyclopedia
The Boston accent is the dialect of English 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 Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Southern Maine. The three regions are frequently grouped together by sociolinguists under the cover term Eastern New England accent, combined 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. This accent is separate and distinct from the Boston Brahmin accent associated with the Boston Brahmin aristocracy.
The best-known features of the Boston accent are non-rhoticity and broad A.
Contents |
Phonological characteristics
All phonetic transcriptions in the IPA; for example:
- how are you? Template:IPA
Non-rhoticity
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. Although not all Boston-area speakers are non-rhotic, this remains the feature most widely associated with the region. As a result, it is frequently the butt of jokes about Boston, as in Jon Stewart's America (The Book), in which he states that the Massachusetts Legislature ratified everything in John Adams' 1780 Massachusetts Constitution "except the letter 'R'".
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 the Boston-native Magliozzi 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.
There are also a number of Boston accent speakers with rhoticity, but they sometimes delete [r] only in unaccented syllables or words before a consonant.
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 or almost 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—do not undergo the so-called horse-hoarse merger, i.e. they 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 [[English-language vowel changes before historic r|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 as people under forty in neighboring New Hampshire and Maine blend the vowel sound. Boston shares these distinctions with both New York and Received Pronunciation, but the Midwest, for instance, has lost them entirely.
The nuclei of the diphthongs Template:IPA and Template:IPA may be raised to something like Template:IPA before voiceless consonants: thus write has a higher vowel than ride. This effect is known usually as Canadian raising, though it is less extreme in New England than in most of Canada.
The nuclei of Template:IPA and Template:IPA are significantly less fronted than in many American accents.
Well-known speakers with the Boston accent
- Norm Abram
- Ben Affleck
- Andrew Card
- Lenny Clarke
- Matt Damon
- Edward "Ted" Kennedy
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- Denis Leary
- Tom and Ray Magliozzi of National Public Radio's Car Talk
- Rob Mariano, reality television contestant
- Joe McIntyre, former New Kids On The Block member
- Joe Quimby, Mayor in The Simpsons cartoon
- Mark Wahlberg
Vocabulary
Some words used in the Boston area but not in many other American English dialects (or with different meanings) are:
- bulkhead — 'basement entrance (usually a metal double door covering a few stairs leading to a cellar door'
- cleansers — 'cleaners (mostly on signage)'
- clicker — 'television remote control'
- coffee regular — 'coffee with milk (or cream) and usually two spoonfuls of sugar'
- dungarees — 'blue jeans (primarily older speakers)'
- frappe — 'milkshake made with ice cream'[1]
- grinder — 'submarine sandwich' (in some places, one that is toasted or grilled)
- milkshake — 'chocolate syrup and milk blended together without ice cream'[2]
- package store or packie — '(packaged) liquor store'
- parlor — 'living room'
- pocket book-- 'purse'
- shopping carriage — 'shopping cart'
- spa — 'convenience store'
- statie — 'State Trooper'
- tag sale - garage or yard sale
- tonic — 'soft drink'
- water bubbler or bubbler — 'drinking fountain / water fountain'
- wicked — 'very', alternatively, 'wicked' may also indicate approval or become a universal descriptor, e.g. "That chowder was wicked good."
Recordings of the Boston accent
- http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english21.html
- http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english79.html
- Dialects Of Massachusetts International Dialects of English Archive (not all these speakers from Massachusetts display the characteristic Boston accent)
Maps
- University of Pennsylvania's TELSUR PROJECT: The North Central Region
- University of Pennsylvania's TELSUR PROJECT: Inland North
- University of Pennsylvania's TELSUR PROJECT: The Northeast: New England to NYC
- University of Pennsylvania's TELSUR PROJECT:The Midland: North and South
- University of Pennsylvania's TELSUR PROJECT: The South
- University of Pennsylvania's TELSUR PROJECT: The West
References
- McCarthy, John (1993). A case of surface constraint violation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 38. 169–95.
- Metcalf, Allan (2000), How We Talk, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
- George Mason University. The Speech Accent Archive, 22 September, 2004.