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The 'Boston accent' is the English dialect not only of the city of Boston, Massachusetts itself but also much of eastern Massachusetts. The Boston accent and closely related accents can be heard commonly in an area stretching throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. These regions are frequently grouped together with Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut by sociolinguists under the cover term 'Eastern New England accent'. The best-known features of the Boston accent are non-rhoticity and broad A. It is most prominent in blue collar - and often traditionally Irish - Boston neighborhoods such as South Boston and Dorchester as well as in nearby cities such as Somerville. The accent is also quite prominent in working class cities throughout the Greater Boston area, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, or in the South Shore exurbs.
All phonetic transcriptions in the IPA; for example:
:how are you?
The traditional Boston accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the phoneme does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant, as in some types of British English. Thus, there is no in words like ''park'' , ''car'' , and ''Harvard'' . After high and mid-high vowels, the is replaced by or another neutral central vowel like : ''weird'' , ''square'' . Similarly, unstressed ("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 [r] only in unaccented syllables or words before a consonant.
The Boston accent has a highly distinctive system of low vowels, even in speakers who do not drop 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 (, ), and the latter (, ). This means that even though ''heart'' has no , it remains distinct from ''hot'' because its vowel quality is different: . By contrast, the accent of New York uses the same or almost the same vowel in both of these classes: . The Received Pronunciation 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 "nasal short-a system". This means that the "short a" vowel as in ''cat'' and ''rat'' becomes a mid-high front diphthong when it precedes a nasal consonant: thus ''man'' is and ''planet'' is . Boston shares this system with the accents of the southern part of the Midwest. 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 short and long vowels before medial than many other modern American accents do: Boston accents maintain the distinctions 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 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. 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' 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.
★ Norm Abram, carpenter known for work on television programs such as ''This Old House''
★ Dicky Barrett, frontman of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and announcer for ''Jimmy Kimmel Live''
★ Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City
★ William J. Bratton, Los Angeles Chief of Police
★ Andy Brickley, sports commentator for Boston Bruins
★ Andrew Card, first White House Chief-of-Staff of the George W. Bush administration
★ Lenny Clarke, comedian and actor
★ Chick Corea, jazz pianist/keyboardist and composer
★ Bette Davis, actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood
★ Bill Delahunt, US House Representative from Massachusetts's 10th congressional district
★ Nick DiPaolo, comedian
★ Sully Erna, singer of Godsmack
★ Carlton Fisk, Major League Baseball catcher
★ Loyd Grossman, chef and presenter on British television
★ Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, late member of Howard Stern's Wack Pack
★ Ted Kennedy (the Kennedys are sometimes described as speaking with a "Kennedy accent")
★ John F. Kennedy see above
★ Robert F. Kennedy see above
★ Don Kent (meteorologist)
★ John Kerry, U.S. Senator, 2004 Democratic nominee for President, particularly in his young adult years and his early years in elected politics, as has been recently apparent in recordings of his appearances before Congressional committees.
★ Christopher Lydon, syndicated public radio talk show personality
★ Tom and Ray Magliozzi of National Public Radio's ''Car Talk''
★ Rob Mariano, reality television contestant
★ Ed Markey, US House Representative from Massachusetts's 7th congressional district
★ Joe McIntyre, former New Kids on the Block member
★ Thomas Menino, current mayor of Boston
★ Christy Mihos, businessman whose campaign ads received some national attention in his unsuccessful bid as an Independent candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 2006
★ George J. Mitchell, former Senator from Maine
★ Charlie Moore, Competitive Bass fisherman featured on ESPN2/ESPN: Outdoors[1]
★ Jim Moran, U.S. Congressman, Virginia's 8th Congressional District
★ Leonard Nimoy, actor on the original '' series[2]
★ Tip O'Neill, late Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
★ Joe Perry, lead guitarist of Aerosmith
★ Jerry Remy, Boston Red Sox color commentator for Fox and NESN
★ Fred Smerlas, former football player for the Buffalo Bills and New England Patriots
★ Donnie Wahlberg, American actor and producer
★ Mark Wahlberg has generally been able to be detected to a degree throughout his career but particularly in earlier films such as ''Fear,'' as well as The Departed, which was set in Boston
★ Jermaine Wiggins, American football player
★ Steven Wright, comedian
★ Kenny Wormald, Professional Dancer, MTV's Dancelife
Some words used in the Boston area but not in many other American English dialects (or with different meanings) are:
★ ''bubbler'' or ''water bubbler'' — 'drinking fountain'
★ ''cleansers'' — 'cleaners (mostly on signage)'
★ ''dooryard'' - the front yard or driveway area
★ ''down cellar'' — 'in the basement'
★ ''frappe'' — 'a blend of ice cream, milk, and syrup'[3] (''milkshake'' refers to a concoction not made with ice cream)
★ ''hopper'' (sounds like ''hoppa'') - toilet or toilet seat; "He can't talk now, he's onna hoppa."
★ ''into town'' — 'into Boston' (similar to New Yorkers' use of "the City")
★ ''jimmies'' - chocolate 'sprinkles'
★ ''johnny'' — a medical gown worn by patients for examinations
★ ''milk shake'' - 'drink composed of milk and flavored syrup, without ice cream[4]'
★ ''packie'' — 'liquor store', short for "package store"
★ ''parlor'' - 'living room', 'family room'
★ ''pisser'' (sounds like ''pissah'') - Good, great, fantastic.[5] A superlative often combined with ''wicked'' (see below) as in "Tommy threw a wicked pissa party last night!"
★ ''puffer'' — hand-held asthma inhaler
★ ''regular coffee'' — 'coffee with milk (or cream) and usually two spoonfuls of sugar'
★ ''rotary'' — 'traffic circle or roundabout'
★ ''spa'' — 'convenience store' (originally, it meant a store with a soda fountain). A "Town Spa" is often a pizza restaurant.
★ ''time'' — 'a party', e.g., "My buddy's having a time over at his place."
★ ''tonic'' — 'soft drink' (''tonic'' is retreating in favor of ''soda'' among younger speakers)
★ ''town club'' or ''sports club'' - When Boston surburbia was woods and farms, men would gather here for deer hunting expeditions. When the land was subdivided into Levitt houses and McMansions, these "clubs" became places where the aging ex-hunters would gather to escape their wives and get drunk.
★ ''The T'' - Public transportation in the Metro Boston area. Refers to the subway, the streetcar, the ferry, and the bus.
★ ''triple decker'' — or more commonly ''three decker'' a three-story, three-family home with one unit built on top of the other'
★ ''wicked'' — 'very'; alternatively, 'wicked' may also indicate approval or become a universal descriptor, e.g., "That chowdah was wicked good."
★ http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english21.html
★ http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english79.html
★ http://home.earthlink.net/~lnkn/accent.htm
1. About Beat Charlie Moore ESPN Outdoors
2. Biography for Leonard Nimoy IMDb
3. Frappe Definition at Boston-Online.com
4. Milkshake Definition at Boston-Online.com
5. Boston Slang
★ McCarthy, John (1993).
★ ''How We Talk: American Regional English Today.'' Metcalf, Allan, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
★ New England English
★ The Boston Slang Dictionary
Phonological characteristics
All phonetic transcriptions in the IPA; for example:
:how are you?
Non-rhoticity
The traditional Boston accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the phoneme does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant, as in some types of British English. Thus, there is no in words like ''park'' , ''car'' , and ''Harvard'' . After high and mid-high vowels, the is replaced by or another neutral central vowel like : ''weird'' , ''square'' . Similarly, unstressed ("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 [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 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 (, ), and the latter (, ). This means that even though ''heart'' has no , it remains distinct from ''hot'' because its vowel quality is different: . By contrast, the accent of New York uses the same or almost the same vowel in both of these classes: . The Received Pronunciation 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 "nasal short-a system". This means that the "short a" vowel as in ''cat'' and ''rat'' becomes a mid-high front diphthong when it precedes a nasal consonant: thus ''man'' is and ''planet'' is . Boston shares this system with the accents of the southern part of the Midwest. 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 short and long vowels before medial than many other modern American accents do: Boston accents maintain the distinctions 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 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. 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
★ Norm Abram, carpenter known for work on television programs such as ''This Old House''
★ Dicky Barrett, frontman of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and announcer for ''Jimmy Kimmel Live''
★ Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City
★ William J. Bratton, Los Angeles Chief of Police
★ Andy Brickley, sports commentator for Boston Bruins
★ Andrew Card, first White House Chief-of-Staff of the George W. Bush administration
★ Lenny Clarke, comedian and actor
★ Chick Corea, jazz pianist/keyboardist and composer
★ Bette Davis, actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood
★ Bill Delahunt, US House Representative from Massachusetts's 10th congressional district
★ Nick DiPaolo, comedian
★ Sully Erna, singer of Godsmack
★ Carlton Fisk, Major League Baseball catcher
★ Loyd Grossman, chef and presenter on British television
★ Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, late member of Howard Stern's Wack Pack
★ Ted Kennedy (the Kennedys are sometimes described as speaking with a "Kennedy accent")
★ John F. Kennedy see above
★ Robert F. Kennedy see above
★ Don Kent (meteorologist)
★ John Kerry, U.S. Senator, 2004 Democratic nominee for President, particularly in his young adult years and his early years in elected politics, as has been recently apparent in recordings of his appearances before Congressional committees.
★ Christopher Lydon, syndicated public radio talk show personality
★ Tom and Ray Magliozzi of National Public Radio's ''Car Talk''
★ Rob Mariano, reality television contestant
★ Ed Markey, US House Representative from Massachusetts's 7th congressional district
★ Joe McIntyre, former New Kids on the Block member
★ Thomas Menino, current mayor of Boston
★ Christy Mihos, businessman whose campaign ads received some national attention in his unsuccessful bid as an Independent candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 2006
★ George J. Mitchell, former Senator from Maine
★ Charlie Moore, Competitive Bass fisherman featured on ESPN2/ESPN: Outdoors[1]
★ Jim Moran, U.S. Congressman, Virginia's 8th Congressional District
★ Leonard Nimoy, actor on the original '' series[2]
★ Tip O'Neill, late Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
★ Joe Perry, lead guitarist of Aerosmith
★ Jerry Remy, Boston Red Sox color commentator for Fox and NESN
★ Fred Smerlas, former football player for the Buffalo Bills and New England Patriots
★ Donnie Wahlberg, American actor and producer
★ Mark Wahlberg has generally been able to be detected to a degree throughout his career but particularly in earlier films such as ''Fear,'' as well as The Departed, which was set in Boston
★ Jermaine Wiggins, American football player
★ Steven Wright, comedian
★ Kenny Wormald, Professional Dancer, MTV's Dancelife
Vocabulary
Some words used in the Boston area but not in many other American English dialects (or with different meanings) are:
★ ''bubbler'' or ''water bubbler'' — 'drinking fountain'
★ ''cleansers'' — 'cleaners (mostly on signage)'
★ ''dooryard'' - the front yard or driveway area
★ ''down cellar'' — 'in the basement'
★ ''frappe'' — 'a blend of ice cream, milk, and syrup'[3] (''milkshake'' refers to a concoction not made with ice cream)
★ ''hopper'' (sounds like ''hoppa'') - toilet or toilet seat; "He can't talk now, he's onna hoppa."
★ ''into town'' — 'into Boston' (similar to New Yorkers' use of "the City")
★ ''jimmies'' - chocolate 'sprinkles'
★ ''johnny'' — a medical gown worn by patients for examinations
★ ''milk shake'' - 'drink composed of milk and flavored syrup, without ice cream[4]'
★ ''packie'' — 'liquor store', short for "package store"
★ ''parlor'' - 'living room', 'family room'
★ ''pisser'' (sounds like ''pissah'') - Good, great, fantastic.[5] A superlative often combined with ''wicked'' (see below) as in "Tommy threw a wicked pissa party last night!"
★ ''puffer'' — hand-held asthma inhaler
★ ''regular coffee'' — 'coffee with milk (or cream) and usually two spoonfuls of sugar'
★ ''rotary'' — 'traffic circle or roundabout'
★ ''spa'' — 'convenience store' (originally, it meant a store with a soda fountain). A "Town Spa" is often a pizza restaurant.
★ ''time'' — 'a party', e.g., "My buddy's having a time over at his place."
★ ''tonic'' — 'soft drink' (''tonic'' is retreating in favor of ''soda'' among younger speakers)
★ ''town club'' or ''sports club'' - When Boston surburbia was woods and farms, men would gather here for deer hunting expeditions. When the land was subdivided into Levitt houses and McMansions, these "clubs" became places where the aging ex-hunters would gather to escape their wives and get drunk.
★ ''The T'' - Public transportation in the Metro Boston area. Refers to the subway, the streetcar, the ferry, and the bus.
★ ''triple decker'' — or more commonly ''three decker'' a three-story, three-family home with one unit built on top of the other'
★ ''wicked'' — 'very'; alternatively, 'wicked' may also indicate approval or become a universal descriptor, e.g., "That chowdah was wicked good."
Recordings of the Boston accent
★ http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english21.html
★ http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english79.html
★ http://home.earthlink.net/~lnkn/accent.htm
References
1. About Beat Charlie Moore ESPN Outdoors
2. Biography for Leonard Nimoy IMDb
3. Frappe Definition at Boston-Online.com
4. Milkshake Definition at Boston-Online.com
5. Boston Slang
★ McCarthy, John (1993).
★ ''How We Talk: American Regional English Today.'' Metcalf, Allan, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
See also
★ New England English
External links
★ The Boston Slang Dictionary
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psst.. try this: add to faves
