Phonetics and Phonology

• The vowel space: no Northern Cities Shift
• Rhoticity
  • r-lessness
  • r-intrusion
  • pre-rhotic [ae] and the merry-marry contrast

The vowel system

Like other dialects of English, Boston English is most notable by its vowel system and by the interaction of vowels with syllable-final and intervocalic /r/. The r-lessness of the dialect is probably the most salient feature for other Americans, but there are several features of the vowel system that deserve comment.

First, Boston English retains the low-back distinction of and , which is typical of the northeastern United States. As a result, Bostonians do not rhyme don with dawn or cot with caught.

Second, Boston English has a nearly monophthongal [u] (as in food) and [o] (as in load). By clicking on the following links, you should be able to hear how these vowels are either monophthongs or only weakly diphthongal.

Third, despite folk dialectology to the contrary, Boston English has not been affected by the Northern Cities Shift, so its low vowels do not show the advancement heard in cities like Detroit and Chicago. The following links illustrate this. You should notice how the Bostonian vowel of words like cop is clearly a low-back , whereas Northern Cities speakers would use a low-central [a] in the same word. Similarly, the Bostonian vowel of words like pack is clearly [æ], while Northern Cities would use an advanced [eæ] in the same word.

Back not advanced:

• "and I go in there with my big, thick Boston accent"
• "then I got a part-time job as a police officer"
• "problem is, with my job, I work for the phone company"
• "because I was still a rookie cop"

Front [æ] not raised:

• "You don't know how to react"
• "but it was a gradual back injury"
• "when I hurt my back ..."
• "you think of a thousand things before it's ever happening"

The table below differentiates the low and back vowel system of Boston English with the Standard American and Northern Cities varieties.

Word	Boston	Standard American	Northern Cities
pack	[æ]	[æ]	[eæ]
cop			[a]
dawn
load	[o]	[ow]	[o]
food	[u]	[uw]	[u]

Rhoticity

An earmark of Boston English is its r-lessness (or "r-dropping"), a pattern in which syllable-final /r/ is not pronounced. It is too simple a statement, however, to say that the dialect simply drops them. This would claim that Bostonians pronounce beer as bee, pore as poe, bare as bay, and spar as spa.

A more accurate description of rhoticity in Boston English must acknowledge that even though syllable-final /r/ is dropped, it is still somehow "visible." That is, it leaves its mark in one of several ways. In words which would have sequences like /ar/ or /er/, like bar and burr, the vowel is longer and has a different quality than in standard American English. In words with pre-rhotic /o/, , and /i/, the /r/ is replaced by a schwa.

An important thing tp remember is that though Bostonians and New Yorkers both have an r-dropping pattern, they don't always do it \ the same way. In fact, it is one cue that they use to distinguish themselves from each other, but the details are often lost on those from outside the region. The Language Samples Project has created a page that illustrates the differences between New York and Boston r-lessness.

Click on the words in this table to compare Boston pronunciations with standard "r-full" ones:

	Word	Boston	Standard American
Vowel lengthens, different quality	bar
	burr
/r/ replaced by schwa	bore
	beer
	bear

Click here for examples from a real speaker:

• "Let's go everyone, the party's over"
• "like bein a garbage collector sometimes, you know?"
• "you went to Harvard?"
• "so I went over and I knocked on the door"
• "I never missed any work"
• "I walked up on the porch, nobody would let me in"

Some New England dialects also have "intrusive r", which is the converse of the r-dropping pattern. Many speakers of these dialects retain a word-final r if it is followed by a word that begins with a vowel. Some of them also add an r between a word that ends with a vowel and another that begins with one.

We have seen that r is not simply dropped; it has an effect on the vowel it leaves behind. It is also retained in certain environments; for example, between vowels, like in carry or Arizona. An interesting property of Boston English (one that it shares with varieties like that of New York) is that the r of these words has less of an altering effect on surrounding vowels than it does in other dialects. That is, Bostonians pronounce carry and marriage with before the medial r, whereas many other North American dialects raise the vowel to .

Click on each word to hear its contrast between Boston and other dialects: carry, Arizona

Boston English

Dialects of the Northeast

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© 2001 The Language Samples Project