Jennifer Chung (2005654208)

ENGL2104 – Rowe

16 May 2008

Research Paper

How to Speak Like a New Englander

Many people assume that the New England accent is basically the Boston accent as the city is considered to be the life of the region, but this is a false assumption. There are in fact several accents and varieties which can be found and the Boston accent is only one of them. Granted, the famous accent in Massachusetts is the most prominent and influential accent but it does not completely represent the neighbouring five states which includes Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut and Rhode Island. This essay will delve into the history of New England and how it affected the phonological and lexical development of New England speech.

1.        History and Geography of New England

The New England expansion all started with Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. The English Puritans fled Lincolnshire due to religions persecution and sailed to the United States on the Mayflower. They were later joined by the English Separatists who situated themselves in the Massachusetts Bay Colony about a decade later. The population then was only around a few hundred. By the second half of the nineteenth century, masses of immigrants flooded New England. The Irish fled to Boston because of the potato famine and they were soon joined by Italians, Russian, Polish, Lithuanians, Greeks, Armenians and Syrians by 1920s. As Boston became a melting pot of numerous of ethnic groups, there was intense dialect variation which help start the New England speech we know today (Wolfram and Ward 2006:64).

Over the centuries, English immigrants moved west away from the coastline in hope of finding better farm land and they later settled in the Connecticut River Valley. Most of the Italians, the Scots and the Irish remained in eastern New England or moved towards southern New England. Linguists claim that the eastern New England speech is the closest to the old New England speech from back in the days (Nagy and Roberts 2004:256).

As settlers moved towards the west and thus spreading the speech patterns to reach the outer areas of New England, the more diverse the New England dialect became. Linguists realized that they could not call New England speech as just one solidified dialect as various regions have slightly different speech patterns. At first the division between patterns was clearly an east-west split but as more research was conducted over the area, linguists realized that there were differences between the north and south as well, especially near the coast. As a result, three main linguistic regions emerged: the northeastern New England, the southeastern New England and western New England. The map on the next page shows the east and west dividing line however there is no line to show the division between the north and the south on the eastern side of New England because not all linguists accept the newer conclusion of there being another split within eastern New England.

  1. New England As A Whole

Dialects spoken by the north is associated as the ‘General American’ speech and this includes New England. There are two primary New England shibboleths which generally exist throughout the region. The first is involves “dropping the postvocalic ‘r’ and the low central vowel in words” (Wolfram and Ward 2006:58).

With the former shibboleth, the ‘r’ is dropped when it is after a vowel and then replaced with the letter ‘h’ when spelling as this is how the word ends up sounding like. As a result, words like ‘Peter Parker’ and ‘hear’ become ‘Petah Pahkah’ and ‘heah’ respectively (Wolfram and Ward 2006:66). However they do not drop all their ‘r’s as they keep it if there is a vowel following the ‘r’. The stereotypical phrase to practice this shibboleth is the line “Park the car in Harvard Yard” where New Englanders would say, “Pahk the car in Hahvahd Yahd”. The ‘r’s in park, Harvard and yard all drop and are replaced with an ‘h’ sound but the ‘r’ at the end of the word ‘car’ is retained because the following word ‘in’ starts with a vowel. In some cases, New Englanders will add ‘r’ to the end of their words even though there should not be one because the following word begins with a vowel. A common example is the phrase “the idea of it” where a New Englander would say, “the idear of it.” (Metcalf 2000:64). Many people also identify the “r-dropping feature as part of Boston Irish speech which suggests that speakers are inclined to “attribute marked linguistic features to the dominant sociopolitical group of the area” (Wolfram and Ward 2006:65).  New Englanders also speak with a low central vowel, meaning the [a] sound in ‘bath’, ‘aunt’ and ‘glass’ sounds like it is spelt with an ‘o’. 

  1. Phonology – To Merge Or Not To Merge?

Phonology plays an important part in New England speech and this is summarized mostly by an east-west split of merged or non-merged sounds. While most of the cases can be boiled down to an east and west distinction, there are some anomalies to the patterns. There are also specific vowels which affect certain words within the region, which are summarized in this section.

3.1 Cot-Caught

Probably New England’s most popular and well known phonological split since the 1930s is the cot-caught merger. Eastern New England tends to merge to two sounds, making it verbally difficult for other people to know which word they are referring to, while western New England cultivated two separate sounds for the words just like New York City which is closer to the western states of New England. As a result, ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ would be pronounced with a [] sound in eastern New England. However in western New England, ‘cot’ would use a [a] sound while ‘caught’ would carry a [] sound (Nagy and Roberts 2004:259).

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There are exceptions to this generalized eastern-western split. Rhode Island which is part of eastern New England does not follow the rest of the region’s pattern of merging the two sounds. Instead, Rhode Island maintains a distinction between the two vowels like the west does. Interestingly thought, Vermont which has the most contact in the western New England region merges the two sounds like the east does. Linguists explain this phenomenon due to Vermont’s lack of contact with the Inland North where the sounds are different because of an isogloss created by Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains. They ...

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