Best Boston Accent Evah?

November 17, 2013 1:35 PM

"In linguistic circles, there is a bit of excitement over the election of Marty Walsh as Boston’s next mayor. Not only does he have a strong Boston accent — perhaps the strongest in the city’s mayoral history — but his speech is a perfect example of the modern dialect, where the broad “a” sound is gone. He’s from Dohchestah. Not Dawchestah. And when it comes time to say pronounce his new job title, he shows the variability of the dialect, which is what actors who drop every R get wrong. Sometimes he’s a may-uh. Sometimes he’s a mare. And a lot of times, he skips both the Y and the R and he’s just a maeh..."
posted by anelsewhere (57 comments total)

. . . People with an actual Boston accent wouldn’t say ‘I pahked my cah in the Hahvid Yahd’ because it’s not so consistent.

Also because you can't park there. And because that joke is ten thousand years old. Man, I hate it, and I wasn't even born here.

The accent's not something you see on the streets as often as the movies have it, due to immigration patterns, but it's still very thick in some places. I once worked with a woman here in Boston for about two weeks before I figured out her name was Marlene and not Molly.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:41 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yes, Hahvid Yahd would be correct not the "Hahvahd" that gets trotted out. (Also, the name of the city is Bawstin in local parlance.)

I'm curious as to how Marty Walsh says his own name. Mah-ty? One would think as a voting Bostonian, I would have heard an interview or seen a debate, but one would be wrong - all my info has been print only.
posted by sonika at 1:49 PM on November 17, 2013

Man, I love American regional accents. Recently I had a phone call with an East Texas landman (from Tyler) and his voice was like instant nostalgia for me. But I'm guessing he was probably well over 50; the younger folks I know from that region don't have nearly as strong an accent. Also I think the folks in the awl bidness lay the accent on extra thick just for authenticity.

Is there any hard numeric evidence about US regional accents disappearing? Everyone says it anecdotally, I'm curious if there's numbers to back it up.

YouTube accent tag videos are a fun way to browse accents. Every video I've seen is from a relatively young person, I imagine because it's an Internet meme kind of thing.
posted by Nelson at 1:50 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I spent a week in Boston recently - I grew up there but haven't lived or spent much time there in many years - and honestly the best thing about it for me was just being surrounded by all the varieties of The Accent. I almost never wore my earbuds because listening to people was just too delicious.
posted by rtha at 1:51 PM on November 17, 2013 [6 favorites]

(Also, the name of the city is Bawstin in local parlance.)

Yet people persist in rendering it "Bahstin," which would be right if we were talking about Barston.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:52 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I can already tell this thread is going to make me say words out loud all night long, my wife thanks you all for filling my house with me going "Words. Wahds. Wereds. Wewrds."
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:55 PM on November 17, 2013 [12 favorites]

I grew up on Long Island in NY, and I really, really can't stand hearing that accent in the least. It makes me cringe. But the years I spent living in Mass around Boston were awesome. I could listen to natives speak til the cows come home.
posted by nevercalm at 1:55 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Which they never will, having dispersed out westawoosta.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:56 PM on November 17, 2013 [10 favorites]

Anecdotally, as someone who grew up in Baltimore and lived for years in southern Ontario, both of which have an accent associated with them, since moving to Boston in the fall I've never been somewhere where the regional accent seems so prevalent. Once in a while in those other places to be sure, but I hear it every day here.
posted by transient at 2:14 PM on November 17, 2013

The accent sneaks into a lot of places outside the city, too. I live in a small town about 50 minutes south of Boston near the RI border, and accents are not very strong. I work in the next town over, which is much more rural, and people there have a much broader accent.
posted by Biblio at 2:19 PM on November 17, 2013

Congratulations, Boston, on your new meh.
posted by ardgedee at 2:19 PM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

I had to teach my daughter that Doctor Who is menaced by Daleks, not DARleks, because she is used to inserting phantom Rs in words from growing up around this accent.

Same reason I thought Candice was really Canders until an embarrassing age.
posted by theredpen at 2:23 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

There's a difference between bahstin and bawstin?
posted by oddman at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2013

When you grow up in California, typically your only exposure to East Coast accents are Hollywood stereotypes such as New York cab drivers and the Kennedy family (yeah, that's about it. Now you can include Jersey Shore in our exposure). When I lived on the East coast for a while, one of the first people I met was this brilliant, beautiful young marine biologist with a very strong New York accent. My brain became unhinged because her strong accent didn't fit my long-preprogrammed mental image. I couldn't even understand, much less appreciate, the various strong New England accents.

By the time I left I didn't even hear the accents unless I thought about it. I noticed that people growing up in the same neighborhood could either have a really strong accent or not have any accent at all (or, more accurately, they picked up the accepted US national television non-accent). It is as though, growing up, we have a choice, and can go one way or the other.

The most wonderful accent I have ever heard was this Dutch girl who had perfected her English while living in Boston. The Boston-Dutch accent is just beautiful.
posted by eye of newt at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

There's a difference between bahstin and bawstin?

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-stin (like a sheep says "baa") is wrong.
Bawwwwwwwwww-stin (like "awww, that's cute") is correct.
posted by sonika at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2013

I love that you can still hear politicians and professional folks in New England with accents. I hear people here here talk about the local accent here but I hardly ever hear anyone actually talking with it non-ironically.
posted by octothorpe at 2:45 PM on November 17, 2013

RI has a bunch of different accents, on account that no native RI can live more than 20 miles from their place of birth. I swear they are like vampires; they have to carry bags of RI dirt and Johnnycakes with them if they travel, lest they crumble to dust. Anyway, a lot of these accents are kind of like the stereotypical Boston accent. One of my coworkers has it, and she was traveling to give a talk, and she had joked that she hoped they would understand her, and the person who met her at the airport had a bag of cutout Rs so that she could use them as necessary while speaking.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:54 PM on November 17, 2013 [8 favorites]

I swear they are like vampires; they have to carry bags of RI dirt and Johnnycakes with them if they travel, lest they crumble to dust.

I don't have dirt, but I do have legit maple syrup and johnnycake mix.

I also have what my husband has referred to as a "shrine" to the car I drove in high school. I've explained that it's not a shrine, it's a tasteful display but he seems to think that a delightful little setup with a picture, the license plate, the keys, and the little plastic model name from the side counts as a shrine. Anyway, this is relevant because the license plate is a legit old-style Rhode Island license plate back when they were just white and blue and the number patter was letter letter - number number number like AA - 111.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 3:11 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

The Providence accent is in no way like the Boston accent. It is an unholy Lovecraftian horror. A very, very loud horror. I do believe it is impossible to speak in a Rhode Island accent at decibels that do not approach that of a 747 coming in for a landing.
posted by sonika at 3:18 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'll admit it, sometimes I say stuff about Rhode Island just for that sweet GenjiandProust favorite.

Also because Rhode Island is awesome.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 3:22 PM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

The Providence accent is in no way like the Boston accent.

I dunno; it has a lot of the mushiness and the R-moving (the law of conservation of Rs -- an R can neither be created or destroyed, but only moved to another place in the sentence -- that characterizes the Boston accent. It adds it's own twist, of course, because no real RIslander has ever been to Boston. That would be Way Too Fah.

(and I do not favorite things just because they mention RI; my feelings about RI are much more complicated than that. Much like my feelings about Boston, which has too many meet-ups.)
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:30 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

As a Californian, I was disappointed that I did not hear any Boston accents when I was in Boston--I had to go out to Salem to hear my first real Boston accent.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:41 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was born in Boston and grew up just south of there. Ordinarily, I do not have much of a Boston accent - perhaps a trace here or there. But boy howdy do I code-switch and bring the MASSIVE TOWNIE WICKED PISSAH ACCENT if the correct circumstance arises... Like talking to any of my siblings on the phone, or talking to Boston-area cab drivers, or discussing electrical work (I apprenticed with one of my siblings, so discussion of electrical work takes on the accent), or really just dealing with anyone else who has the accent.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:43 PM on November 17, 2013 [9 favorites]

Also, I got to explain to some non-Bostonian friends of mine some of the class distinctions and 'lace curtain irish' vs 'shanty irish' in the discussion of accents and code switching in "You had different accents, didn't you?" scene in "The Departed".
posted by rmd1023 at 3:46 PM on November 17, 2013 [7 favorites]

The Providence accent is in no way like the Boston accent. It is an unholy Lovecraftian horror.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Cranston, RI?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:06 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Also see the Wicked Good Guide to Boston English.
My favorite: Snappin' gaggahs.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 4:53 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I grew up on Long Island in NY, and I really, really can't stand hearing that accent in the least.

Long Island and Boston accents are the two regional accents that really set my teeth on edge in movies. I have no actual reason for it, no childhood trauma or anything. But whenever I hear them in a movie it's like nails on a blackboard.

In person I barely even notice those accents -- it's totally a movie thing, probably because actors ratchet up the brayingness and nasalness to eleven, like a bad country singer going too strong on the fake twang.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:18 PM on November 17, 2013

You wanna talk about Lovecraftian horror? Growing up, there were always certain phrases that we always said in French at home (thanks Memere!), so I learned bits of Canadian French filtered through Central Falls Frenglish (think Woonsocket) filtered through the Rhode Island accent. I took Spanish in high school because my French pronunciation could never recover from that.
posted by Ruki at 5:43 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Bawwwwwwwwww-stin (like "awww, that's cute") is correct.

Uh, I'm a native New Englander, but isn't this the only widely accepted way in American English to pronounce that vowel? Or can I get some IPA up in heah?
posted by threeants at 5:51 PM on November 17, 2013

I get really annoyed reading pop ling articles that center around pronunciation but don't provide IPA or at least some sort of scheme that halfway makes sense. When the Globe reports that Walsh pronounces the word "maer", what the heck is that supposed to represent?
posted by threeants at 6:17 PM on November 17, 2013

Long Island and Boston accents are the two regional accents that really set my teeth on edge in movies.

It's certainly not that common, but people with OMG Movie-Level Lon Gisland Accents do exist. There was one in my dorm first year at college; just to make the Accent Gods happy she was from Babylon and named Donna.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:20 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

There are occasionally good Boston accents in movies. Denis Leary shows one off in Two If By Sea. It sounds even better in contrast to costar Sandra Bullock's attempt.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:26 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

also:

The use of the mouth is somewhat lazy in the Boston dialect

what

This ridiculous statement is dropped blithely into the article as uncontested fact...but it's actually a pre-contemporary, pseudolinguistic notion that I doubt any respected linguist would ever get behind.
posted by threeants at 6:33 PM on November 17, 2013

Well, I moved here with a bland Southern Californian no-accent accent, and through years of joking around with the local accent I find that I can no longer pronounce the words "Bawstin" and "cawfee" the was I used to. Mom was partially right — keep doing that and you'll get stuck that way.
posted by benito.strauss at 6:37 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

There are occasionally good Boston accents in movies. Denis Leary shows one off in Two If By Sea. It sounds even better in contrast to costar Sandra Bullock's attempt.

Well, Leary did grow up in Worcester, which has basically the same accent.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:44 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

At Boston College in 1993, I had a professor of literature named Philip O'Leary who was teaching a class on the Irish Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance. It was an awesome class. Anyway, he once spent an entire day going through the varieties of the eastern Mass. accents, from Worcester to Cambridge to Boston (North Shore) to Boston (South Shore) to Boston (Southie) and on and on. He got all of them, and pointed out all the subtle differences and similarities, and he did it without judgement.

It was a tour de force, and I can't recall saying that about very many things ever.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:44 PM on November 17, 2013 [5 favorites]

Speaking of Lovecraftian horror, I wish I could hear an old Edison recording of the rural New England accent that died out in the early 20th century. You see it in old stories, but it's hard to imagine. The Maine accent is probably closest.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:24 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

When I lived in Norfolk VA for a few years, my old Boston accent came in handy.

Tidewater accent. I don't hear this as like Boston's in general, but there are similarities.

You note some New Orleans similarities as well, which I do hear. Wikipedia calls it "Brooklyn-esque", which I do not hear. I heard it explained to me by a red-haired local wearing a Celtics jersey more or less like this: Boston and NOLA were the two biggest destination ports for the Irish from 1840 to 1890. The end.

This explanation leaves out New York, of course. So ymmv. But the idea that New Orleans is in some way tightly culturally bound to Boston appeals to me very much.
posted by mwhybark at 7:35 PM on November 17, 2013

Are you sure you're not thinking of Cranston, RI?

You mean "CVaaaaaaaaaanstn"? *shudder* Very likely the worst accent in America.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:37 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I grew up in and around Boston, but now live 3,000 miles away in Seattle, and I am loving this thread so fucking much. Like, if I could, I would just live in this thread for the next few hours.

I loooooooooooooooooove that the new mayor is introducing the rest of the country to a proper Boston accent. I grew up amongst the lace curtain Irish (in the "R-less corridor" the article refers to) and the only people I ever knew who talked like the Kennedys were a few older Irish people - a friend's mother and a salty American history teacher I had in middle school come to mind. And they both idolized JFK, so I'm not 100% certain they hadn't adopted that accent from the Kennedys.

Most of the people I grew up with who had the accent spoke like Marty.

But that is the interesting thing about the Boston accent - it's actually kind of hard to have it. You pretty much only have it if your parents do, and since there are so many transplants who come for school or professional jobs, there does tend to be a class aspect to it. Not that professional people don't have the accent, but you're a lot less likely to hear it in Newton (wealthy professional suburb) than you are in West Roxbury (more middle-class residential neighborhood of Boston that's really close to Newton).

Neither of my parents are from the area, so neither my brother or I have the accent, even though we lived in two heavily Irish communities growing up and should have, by all rights, gotten the accent by osmosis or something.

Though every once in a while, it comes out anyway, usually when I'm saying something very Boston, like ordering a coffee "regular" from Dunkin Donuts. Or a friend who I met in school in Boston but is also from Seattle, still cracks up at the time we were talking about the crazy streets in Boston and he just could not figure out that I was saying they used to be "cowpaths" because to his West Coast ears, it sounded like I was saying cahpats and he was like "what the hell is a cahpat?"

Oh, and of course it comes out when I'm drunk sometimes, as well it should.
posted by lunasol at 9:37 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

All I wanna know iz, duz tha new Mayah use Twidda?
posted by armoir from antproof case at 9:55 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Is there any hard numeric evidence about US regional accents disappearing? Everyone says it anecdotally, I'm curious if there's numbers to back it up.

Generally, it's considered a bit of a myth. If anything, language will become more diverse, not less, because accent and dialect are closely tied to geographic identity. And of course, we're right in the middle of an unusually dramatic accent change, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

It's a bit similar in some ways to how in the UK, Received Pronunciation, London Cockney, and eastern counties dialects have merged into Estuary English. Some things vanish, something new arises. It may not have the geographic specificity of the older markers, but that's to be expected with people moving around more and contacting broader varieties of accent in their daily lives.
posted by dhartung at 12:08 AM on November 18, 2013 [5 favorites]

Aw, I miss Boston accents. Living where there's a brogue helps compensate.

I lost some respect for someone I knew when he told me that he thought someone with a strong Boston accent sounded less intelligent.
posted by kyrademon at 3:33 AM on November 18, 2013

what the hell is a cahpat

Something you get at the auto parts store, duh.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:16 AM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

I had a relative who spoke with a very slight Boston Brahmin accent which is completely different than the accent everyone associates with Boston.

It's hilarious listening to his son pour it on extra-thick to conspicuously flaunt his supposed class.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:44 AM on November 18, 2013

Grew up there. Moved away and haven't been back on 25 years. Loving this.

And now for a vocabulary word: yipwat : the place where airplanes take off and land : "I flew outah Login Yipwat."
posted by slkinsey at 5:37 AM on November 18, 2013 [4 favorites]

You mean "CVaaaaaaaaaanstn"? *shudder* Very likely the worst accent in America.

Really? I find Warwick-ese more disturbing. It seems even more mush-mouthed, almost like there are no consonants but the final, vague K.

On the other hand, years ago in Texas, I was asked, rather incredulously, "Are you from Canada?" I said "huh? Oh, no, that's Minnesota you're hearing." Those Os are out of control.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:41 AM on November 18, 2013

By the time I left I didn't even hear the accents unless I thought about it. I noticed that people growing up in the same neighborhood could either have a really strong accent or not have any accent at all (or, more accurately, they picked up the accepted US national television non-accent). It is as though, growing up, we have a choice, and can go one way or the other.

My father has seven siblings; some of them have quite strong accents, some, my father included, much milder. I'm a bit of a chameleon myself and tend to pick up the accent of whoever I'm speaking to, Irish accents and southern accents particularly.
posted by Diablevert at 5:52 AM on November 18, 2013

to all fellow 'pahked the cah in harhv...' haters, try this:

"Get yoah fingiz outta the snowblowah, befoa they get sevid awf!"

It separates the posers from the rest.

Clooney's refusal to even try the accent in "The Perfect Storm?" Respect.
posted by drowsy at 7:42 AM on November 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

GenjiandProust: "...the R-moving (the law of conservation of Rs -- an R can neither be created or destroyed, but only moved to another place in the sentence -- that characterizes the Boston accent."

YES! I remember having this exact epiphany as a young teen in a comic shop in Reading, MA, watching a dude come inside on a really windy day, shouting "Man, it's ROAR out theyah!"
posted by anthom at 10:35 AM on November 18, 2013

At least three people in my office hate hate HATE Boston accents for unidentifiable reasons. (Unidentifiable because I've asked each of them multiple times why they hate them so much and they can never come up with a good answer.) I grew up west of Boston and never really had a strong accent - or so I thought. I moved to DC in 1999 and purged wicked and retahded from my vocabulary, but every once in a while I'd get going and someone would turn to me and say, "You're from Boston/New England, aren't you?" In fact it happened in Texas this summer, just from ordering a Tanqueray and tonic with a lime, and an Absolut and tonic with a lemon. There are no discernible dropped Rs or other specific New Englandisms in that order; it's more the speed and cadence of speech than anything else. I can pick it up myself, on the rare occasion that I run into anyone from back east here in KCMO. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not just the randomly dropped R; there's a whole lot more to the dialect, it's subtle, and I think that's why actors can't usually get it.

Anyway, back to my co-workers. I went "home" to MA for my 25 year high school reunion this summer and came back (on purpose) with a wicked bad Boston accent and proceeded to drive my co-workers nuts for a few hours that first day back. It was fun. I'd do it again.
posted by jennaratrix at 10:58 AM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Clooney's refusal to even try the accent in "The Perfect Storm?" Respect.

Yes. It's such a hard accent to get right. I'm still mad at 30 Rock for the Julianne Moore debacle.
posted by lunasol at 11:09 AM on November 18, 2013

And here's a look at Hizzoner's highly idiosyncratic contributions to our native dialect.
posted by anelsewhere at 11:21 AM on November 18, 2013

I'm still mad at 30 Rock for the Julianne Moore debacle.

I was trying so hard to repress those memories. So bad. So very, very bad. Writhing in psychic torment bad.
posted by sonika at 2:15 PM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

I grew up in Cvvvvvannnnnnstn, RI! I do not have the accent, because my parents are big snobs and raised us to sound like generic east coasters. I did know people who said "Vo-dilun” instead of Rhode Island.

My Memere and her sisters grew up in Artic, a village in a West Warwick. They spoke Canadian French at home and English at school. As a result, they had really strange franglais speech patterns. I remember they would say things like "throw me down the stairs my sweater" and dropped the consonants off the ends of words as though they were French.

I live in kind of an accent no-man's land right now, so close to both Providence and Boston.
posted by Biblio at 5:35 PM on November 18, 2013

Just spent the weekend with in-laws up in Woostah. My MIL and her sisters have accents you could cut glass with. My wife has lost a good bit - and she grew up in Southborough, so had less to start with - but she code switches whenever we are up there, which is amusing.

Don't get her started on how Ben Affleck can't do a good Bahston accent. "He's not from Boston, he's from Cambridge!"
posted by Chrysostom at 1:15 PM on November 20, 2013

Not sourced, but the IMDB trivia for To Die For (set in New Hampshire, heavily based on the Pamela Smart case) claims that Gus Van Sant cast Casey Affleck in part because he had not lost his "strong Boston accent", compared to his brother. (It also notes that Casey mentioned that his brother and his brother's friend Matt had a draft screenplay to show him....)
posted by dhartung at 10:44 AM on November 22, 2013