weeping on a willow, sleeping on a pillow, leaping armadillo, yes!

[primroseburrows]

I know I'm procrastinating when I'm actually surfing Wikipedia. But y'know, find things. Like the page on the Boston accent.

"The Boston accent is the English dialect not only of the city of Boston, Massachusetts itself but also much of eastern Massachusetts." Check.

"It and closely related accents can be heard commonly in an area stretching throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine." Check.

"These regions are frequently grouped together with Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut by sociolinguists under the cover term Eastern New England accent." SO, SO WRONG.

Rhode Islanders sound very different from Boston/Mass/Maine folken. Say a couple of people from, oh, I dunno, Cveeeeanstin (That's a common RI pronounciation, honest!) are sitting around with their friends from Boston wondering when Donna and Bobby are going to come back with the Chinese take-out. The RI people in the group will say "Daahner and Baahby". The Bostonians will say "Dawnah and "Bawby". The RI accent is more like New York than Boston, which may help explain the sad but true fact that many Rhode Islanders are fans of the Evil Empire. Also, Vo D'eyelandiz are, like Bostonians, are all about the non-rhoticity (how cool is that for a term?). The difference is that RI speakers put the R back. They say pahk and cah and sistah, sure, but they also say Linder and Hanner and idear and grammer (meaning "gramma").

Here is a typical example of the Boston accent. This guy lives in Dorchester, near Southie.

I tried to find a recording of a RI accent, but no, there isn't one. :/


Of course, none of this applies when you're talking about Woonsocket (pronounced "Woone sock két" or even "Woone sock ay" by the locals). The town was settled by immigrants from Québec who came to work in the mills. There probably aren't that many people under fifty with French accents, but they still use the grammar (sort of like how some Irish people still use the Gaelic grammar)If a guy from Woonsocket wants you to toss his jacket down to him, he's likely to say "t'row me down the stairs, my coat". He "pahks his cahs side by each", and, I kid you not, "lives on top of his mother". Well, if his mother lives in the flat downstairs, that is. :) If you go to Woonsocket, you'll want to drive slow your car.

Believe it or not, I've never been to Woonsocket. I might have gone through there to get from point A to point B, but I don't remember ever stopping there. This is not good, because Woonsocket has the Museum of Work and Culture. Really, I should lose my geek license for not ever going there.

If you're really interested in the Rhode Island accent, or are a giantgiant dork like me (and you are, if you're really interested in the Rhode Island accent), you might want to take a look at this little RI dictionary. fascinating.

And hmm. I wonder why, after twenty-eight years of living in RI, I don't consider myself a Rhode Islander? *waves "I'm From Massachusetts" banner*

This pointless post took forever to write (I'm cleaning at the same time, honest!). I really ought to get therapy. :/

Comments

Comment, Part 1

[organist89.livejournal.com]

Wow, Kelly, I could not have picked a better time to read up on your LJ. This article is amazing. I have always been fascinated by accents. I moved around a lot as a kid, but I spent my first eight years in northern New Jersey (Bergen County, to be exact), and I still have a clearly identifiable north Jersey accent. There are two things about my speech that make it "classic north Jersey"--(1) is that I speak very, very quickly. (2) is that I don't pronounce vowel sounds in the "normal" manner. The sound "or", when it's in a word like orange, Florida, forehead, forest, tomorrow, horrid, or horrible, doesn't come out as "or" like "oar" or "for". It comes out "ar", like in "car", "bar", or "far" (no MA accent on the "r"). So instead of "or-ange", I end up with "ar-ange". I've been compared to a pirate, with the "ar" thing. Also, the short vowel sound "a", like in accent, adapt, cat, etc. comes out very nasally, and with a hint of a "y" attached to the end. I don't really know how else to describe it. Oh, and for all those of you who were wondering, people from Jersey do not call it "Joi-zee". People from Brooklyn, and people from elsewhere who are just plain stupid, do that. I must say that I find those "You might be from _________ if..." lists to be great. I read the north Jersey one the other day. It rocked, because I met virtually every one of the criteria.

All of the info that I've found on the Internet about Jersey accents has been very vague. Most things point out that there is a slight difference between a north Jersey accent and a south Jersey accent..prolly cuz the north is close to New York, and the south is close to Philly.

The thing you pointed out about how RI folks turn -a words into -er words, like "Donna" to "Daahner"...that's not just RI. That's common throughout the northeast. Jersey folks do that too, but not so much the "Daah-" part. We would say it more "Donner", like the reindeer.

If you're ever stuck at HMS for a while, track down Dale Coye. He's Bev's husband. He has a PHd in linguistics, and he's a published author; see here: http://www.amazon.com/Pronouncing-Shakespeares-Words-Dale-Coye/dp/0415941822

As I said, I spent my "accent-forming" years in Jersey. But I've also lived for 2.5 years in New York (the countryside, not the city), and 7 years in eastern Massachusetts. My dad had a weird accent...his dad was a doctor in the army, so he moved everywhere as a kid. His original accent was pretty Texan, but he kind of lost it when he went to Yale. My mom had one parent from Montana, one parent from Oklahoma, and she grew up in New York City. She had a weird way of speaking.

As you may know, I live in Virginia now. There are some interesting accents here, because I'm close to Maryland and West Virginia. One of Virginia's nicest colleges, George Mason University, has done a huge project with accents. They came up with a short paragraph of text, and recorded hundreds of people saying it. The people were of all ages, and from all around the country. They also have a section of folks from other countries, for whom English is not their native language. They have two RI accent recordings; this one is the more prominent of the two (although it's not spectacular):

http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&speakerid=511

Check out that website. Some of them are really great. I like one of the ones from Louisiana in particular. They invite people to self-record and send the file in.


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