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Northwestern New England English, sometimes labeled as a Vermont accent, is the most complete or advanced Western New England English variety in terms of the cot–caught merger, occurring largely everywhere north of Northampton, Massachusetts, towards [ɑ]. [18]
New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. [1] [2] Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping" (though this and other features are now receding among younger speakers). [3]
Recognized by research since the 1940s is the linguistic boundary between Eastern and Western New England, the latter settled from the Connecticut and New Haven colonies, rather than the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies. Western New Englanders settled most of upstate New York and the Inland North. Dialectological research has revealed ...
There is also evidence for an alternative theory, according to which the Great Lakes area—settled primarily by western New Englanders—simply inherited Western New England English and developed that dialect's vowel shifts further. 20th-century Western New England English variably showed NCS-like TRAP and LOT/PALM pronunciations, which may ...
Speakers with the merger in northeastern New England still maintain a phonemic distinction between a fronted and unrounded /ɑ/ (phonetically ) and a back and usually rounded /ɔ/ (phonetically ), because in northeastern New England (unlike in Canada and the Western United States), the cot–caught merger occurred without the father–bother ...
English-language scholar William A. Kretzschmar Jr. explains in a 2004 article that the term "General American" came to refer to "a presumed most common or 'default' form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or the South" and referring especially to speech associated with the vaguely-defined "Midwest", despite any historical or present ...
Inland Northern English: Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Western New York, the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, and most of the U.S. Great Lakes region; New England English. Eastern New England English (including Boston and Maine English) Rhode Island English; Western New England English: Connecticut, Hudson Valley, western Massachusetts ...
Western American English is defined primarily by two phonological features: the cot-caught merger (as distinct from most traditional Northern and Southern U.S. English) and the fronting of the /u/ (GOOSE) vowel but not the /oʊ/ (GOAT) vowel. This fronting is distinct from most Southern and Mid-Atlantic American English, in which both of those ...