The Boston accent is among the most well-known in America, and the most frequently mentioned aspects of it are "dropped R's" and the fronted vowel in phrases like park the car. Very little scholarly research about the dialects of Massachusetts and New Hampshire has been published since the Linguistic Atlas of New England in the 1930's.
For several years now, UNH students have been designing and carrying out a research project on the way English is spoken in New England. The main accomplishment so far has been collecting dialect surveys from many speakers in NH, VT, and MA. The methodology and some findings from these surveys is presented in:
Nagy, N. 2001. 'Live free or die' as a linguistic principle. American Speech 76.1:30-41. (Download PDF of paper)
An overview of findings to date, based primarily on the surveys, is in:
Nagy, N. & J. Roberts. 2004. New England: phonology. In Edgar Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie and Clive Upton,eds. A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology. Berlin, NY: Mouton de Gruyter. 270-281. [This is a multimedia volume available in the Reference Department of Dimond Library. Call number: PE1711 .H36 2004.]
There has also been coverage of this research in the popular media.
The next stage is to examine recordings of speakers. Some UNH students have begun to do this as well. Two publications with student authors have appeard so far:
Ryback-Soucy, Wendy & Naomi Nagy. 2000. Exploring the dialect of the Franco-Americans of Manchester, NH. Journal of English Linguistics 28.3:249-264. (Download .zip file)
Chiavetta, Shellie. 2006. That Was Totally Intense! A Study of Emphatic Adverbial Modifiers in Male and Female Speech. Inquiry: UNH Undergraduate Research Journal. Spring 2006.
In 2006, Tricia Irwin, an MA student in Linguistics at UNH, designed a research methodology using a reading passage to collect comparable samples of speech from speakers in Boston, MA, and Manchester, NH. We now have digitized recordings of 25 speakers from Boston and about 10 from Manchester, all reading the same 3-page text. The reading passage includes over 200 words with orthographic post-vocalic /r/, and
Tricia's primary interest is to describe the pattterns of /r/-production with respect to certain phonological and social factors, for the Boston speakers. The passage also includes lots of words to see how people pronounce some other important sociolinguistic variables:
The first report of quantitative analysis of (R) in Boston is:
Irwin, Tricia & Naomi Nagy. 2006. Bostonians' /r/ speaking: A quantitative look at (R) in Boston. Paper presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 35) conference, Columbus, OH.
This is where you come in. We need more data and analysis! Students in Introduction to Linguistics, Phonetics & Phonology and Sociolinguistics Survey may choose to work with a subset of these data for their term research projects and/or collect additional data. You can choose one of the above variables and a subset of speakers that interests you. Students in Phonetics & Phonology would be expected to conduct acoustic analysis of the variables of interest to them. Students in Sociolinguistics Survey would be expected to look quantitatively at patterns of variation that correlate to both linguistic and social factors. You will become familiar with these approaches in class and we will use class time as necessary to organize this project.
You may do this individually or as a group. For your class project, you may use the data that Tricia and I collected, as long as you acknowledge its source in your paper and presentations, and you may use Tricia's reading passage to record more speakers. The idea is to have students continue to participate in the research and work toward presentation and publication of these data. Undergraduates may find support for this work through the UROP program and MA students may choose to continue on this topic for the MA paper.
The reading passage, data coded for (R) in Boston, and the digitized recordings are available in Blackboard's Linguistics organization, which UNH linguistics students may have access to. Contact the professor for access to this part of Blackboard, a "Group" called "R in Boston."
Return to syllabus for Sociolinguistics Survey or Phonetics & Phonology.
Go to the UNH Linguistics homepage.
This page last updated September 4, 2006. Questions may be addressed to Naomi Nagy.