Is That New England Accent in Retreat?
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Mitt Romney drew some criticism in March when he wrestled over the pronunciation of “Missouri.” But some residents of the state where he spends his vacations, according to a recent article in the journal American Speech, have become increasingly uncertain how to pronounce “New Hampshire.”
It used to be that people east of the Green Mountains, which run through the middle of Vermont, reliably called it “New Hampsha.” But in “Farewell to the Founders: Major Dialect Changes Along the East-West New England Border,” three linguists show that the line separating people who drop their R’s from those who don’t has moved toward the east, to the Vermont-New Hampshire border — and, in the case of young people, has even encroached deep into the Granite State itself.
And it isn’t just a matter of “non-rhoticity,” the technical name for the speech pattern that makes people “pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd.” The study’s authors — James N. Stanford, Thomas A. Leddy-Cecere and Kenneth P. Baclawski Jr. — also discovered an erosion of several other distinctive features of eastern New England speech, including the different vowels for “father” and “bother” and for “Mary,” “merry,” and “marry.” (The distinction between “horse” and “hoarse,” however, seems to be hanging on.)
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The east-west distinction in northern New England speech was first described in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and held firm in a 1987 study based on data gathered in the 1960s for the Dictionary of American Regional English. But over the past decade, the current study’s authors — all of whom have long roots in New England — began noting that they heard the distinction less reliably and set out to investigate.
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http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/is-that-new-england-accent-in-retreat/
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