The northeastern United States has a wide variety of distinct accents and dialects. The diversity that exists in the modern northeast is partially a consequence of its older settlement: communities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia have been around longer than similar-sized communities in the western U.S. As a result, the speech of each urban community has had more time to diverge from the dialects of other nearby cities. Yet as we will see below, some of these divergent innovations are comparatively recent.
This page is intended as a gateway to discussions of several specific northeastern dialects. The general traits page describes a number of features common to all northeastern dialects. These are features which help distinguish them as a group from other American varieties like Southern American English, African American English, and the English of the Mid-west and West. You wil also find links to pages about the English in and around Boston and New York City. In addition, the discussion of the Northern Cities Shift describes some phonological features that are typical of Detroit, Buffalo, and Chicago, among others.
© 2001 The Language Samples Project