That Pesky "R"-less Bostonian Accent

One of the most recognizable American English dialects is the "Boston Accent," which actually stretches into other parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.  As a result, "Eastern New England" accent is a more appropriate description.

Notoriously known for its lack of pronunciation of the "-r," Boston has become known for the overused, trite, and now clichéd "Park the car in Harvard Yard" as it includes several uses of the letter r, which most Bostonians fail to pronounce.

However, while the deletion of the "r" sound in certain words like Harvard and yard, those with the New England dialect also tend to add the "r" sound, oftentimes to link it the next word, although not always.  An example of this is the word idea, most often pronounced in New England as "idear" (phonetically written as [aidiər] )

While all Boston speakers may not drop the "r" sound in their every day speech, one of the more universal changes in language in the New England area is the distinctive system of low vowels.  To an outsider of the dialect, the vowel sounds in "bother" and "hot" are generally the same.  It would be assumed that the word "heart," since the r sound is dropped, would sound much like "hot."  However, the New England dialect remedies such the case as their vowels are much lower.

Boston English has a  "nasal short-A system, ( [æ] ) which means the short-A vowel like  cat and rat transforms into a mid-high front diphthong [eə] when it precedes a nasal consonant.  Subsequently, "man" becomes [meən]

·  bubbler:  'drinking fountain'

·  bulkhead:  'basement entrance'

·  cellar:  basement

·  dungarees:  'blue jeans'

·  wicked: 'very'

http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english21.html