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PHONOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS All Phonetic Transcription s in the IPA ; for example: :how are you? Non-rhoticity The traditional Boston accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the ("er") is replaced by , , or , as in ''color'' . 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 becomes a low back vowel : ''corn'' is , pronounced the same or almost the same as ''con'' or ''cawn.'' For some old-fashioned speakers, stressed as in ''bird'' is replaced by (); for many present-day Boston-accent speakers, however, is retained. More speakers lose after other vowels than lose . The Boston accent possesses both Linking R And Intrusive R : That is to say, a will not be lost at the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel, and indeed a 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 Some speakers who are natively non-rhotic or partially non-rhotic attempt to change their accent by restoring 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 instead of . Occasionally such speakers may Hypercorrect and "restore" to a word that never originally had it. This usage is frequent when a word ending in a vowel is followed by a word starting with a vowel. Speakers will say "I have no idea," but add an r if they say "The idea-r is..." There are also a number of Boston accent speakers with rhoticity, but they sometimes delete {Link without Title} 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 as described above. Eastern of England, like Boston English, distinguishes the classes, using in ''father'' and in ''bother''. On the other hand, the Boston accent (unlike the Rhode Island accent) merges the two classes exemplified by ''caught'' And ''cot'' : both become . So ''caught'', ''cot'', ''law'', ''water'', ''rock'', ''talk'', ''doll'', and ''wall'' all have exactly the same vowel, . For some speakers, as mentioned above, words like ''corn'' and ''horse'' also have this vowel. By contrast, New York accents have for ''caught'' and for ''cot''; Received Pronunciation has and , respectively. Some older Boston speakers — the ones who have a low vowel in words like ''corn'' — 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. The former are in the same class as ''corn'', as and , and the latter are and . 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 ". By contrast, Received Pronunciation uses regardless of whether the next consonant is nasal or not, and New York uses before a nasal at the end of a syllable () but not before a nasal between two vowels (). 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 , such as ''half'' and ''bath'', that vowel is replaced with : , . (In Received Pronunciation, the Broad A vowel is .) 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. The word ''aunt'', however, remains almost universally broad. Boston accents make a greater variety of distinctions between between the vowels in ''marry'' , ''merry'' , and ''Mary'' , ''hurry'' and ''furry'' , ''mirror'' and ''nearer'' , though some of these distinctions are somewhat endangered as people under 40 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 and may be raised to something like before , though it is less extreme in New England than in most of Canada . Furthermore, some Boston dialects have a tendency (similar to the Upper Midwest) to raise the /au/ diphthong in both voiced and voiceless environments. The nuclei of and are significantly less fronted than in many American accents. NON-RHOTICITY ELSEWHERE IN NEW ENGLAND Non-rhoticity outside of the Boston area decreased greatly after World War II. Traditional maps have marked most of the territory east of the Connecticut river as non-rhotic, but this is highly inaccurate of contemporary speakers. The ''Atlas of North American English'', for example, shows none of the six interviewed speakers in New Hampshire (a historically non-rhotic area) as having more than 10% non-rhoticity. WELL-KNOWN SPEAKERS OF/WITH THE BOSTON ACCENT
VOCABULARY Some words used in the Boston area but not in many other American English dialects (or with different meanings) are:
RECORDINGS OF THE BOSTON ACCENT
REFERENCES
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