New England: phonology

The six states that make up New England (NE) are Vermont (VT), New Hampshire (NH), Maine (ME), Massachusetts (MA), Connecticut (CT), and Rhode Island (RI). Cases where speakers in these states exhibit differences from other American speakers and from each other. The major sources of phonological information regarding NE dialects are the Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE) (Kurath 1939-43), and Kurath (1961), representing speech patterns from the first half of the 20^th century; and Labov, Ash and Boberg, (fc); Boberg (2001); Nagy, Roberts and Boberg (2000); Cassidy (1985) and Thomas (2001) describing more recent stages of the dialects.

There is a split between eastern and western NE, and a north-south split within eastern NE. Eastern New England (ENE) comprises Maine (ME), New Hampshire (NH), eastern Massachusetts (MA), eastern Connecticut (CT) and Rhode Island (RI). Western New England (WNE) is made up of Vermont, and western MA and CT. The lines of division are illustrated in figure 1. Two major New England shibboleths are the “dropping” of post-vocalic r (as in [ka:] car and [ba:n] barn) and the low central vowel [a] in the BATH class, words like aunt and glass (Carver 1987: 21). It is not surprising that these two features are among the most famous dialect phenomena in the region, as both are characteristic of the “Boston accent,” and Boston, as we discuss below, is the major urban center of the area. However, neither pattern is found across all of New England, nor are they all there is to the well-known dialect group. We present a brief description of the settlement of the region as a whole and give examples of past and current pronunciation patterns to illustrate both how New England differs from the rest of the country and what region-internal differences exist. The material is rather thin in some areas, due to a dearth of recent research on New England English. Nevertheless, the resulting pattern is one that reflects the richness and diversity of the region itself.