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A Boston accent is a local accent of Eastern New England English, native specifically to the city of Boston and its suburbs. Northeastern New England English is classified as traditionally including New Hampshire, Maine, and all of eastern Massachusetts, while some uniquely local vocabulary appears only around Boston.
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]
Eastern New England English, here including Rhode Island English, is classically associated with sound patterns such as: non-rhoticity, or dropping r when not before a vowel; both variants of Canadian raising, including a fairly back starting position of the /aʊ/ vowel (as in MOUTH); [7] [8] and some variation of the PALM– LOT–THOUGHT ...
In addition, anecdotal evidence from accounts of English colonists indicate that the Massachusett or related N-dialect speakers had trouble with English /r/ and /l/, even though they existed in related languages, since they pronounced English words sleep and lobster as sneep and nobstah.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language.. These charts give a diaphoneme for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects.
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]
As late as 1795, the population of Massachusetts was nearly 95% of English ancestry. [214] During the early and mid-19th century, immigrant groups began arriving in Massachusetts in large numbers; first from Ireland in the 1840s; [215] today the Irish and part-Irish are the largest ancestry group in the state at nearly 25% of the total population.
Those who were more proficient and bilingual in English likely pronounced them closer to English pronunciation with most speakers adapting it to local Massachusett phonology. This can be seen in US English, with more educated speakers or those with some French-language familiarity pronouncing the loan word guillotine as either anglicized ...