Origin of Boston Accent

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Pat Brennan speaking. I live in San Diego.

Hi, Pat. Welcome.

And I had a question about accents.

Okay. We’d love to hear it.

I grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and at a young age, we moved to San Diego for the fishing industry in Point Loma.

I have had this accent that I have since I was about 15 in California.

Of course I had before that.

And I have been commented on by every single person I have ever met in my life as soon as I open my mouth.

And I don’t even say a word with an R in it.

They know I’m from somewhere, but they don’t know where.

All my cousins have lost their accents.

And do not have the Boston accent anymore.

And I’m wondering, where does this accent come from, and what mix of English or French or other people coming down from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the Irish, where did this accent come from?

Well, I like it, Pat. It reminds me of my Boston relatives.

There’s a short story to tell you.

Actually, this is a deep subject that requires reading a book to fully understand.

But the brief version of this story, the briefest that I can make it, is that it used to be that there was full roticity in American English.

That is, we all pronounced our R’s.

But there became a period where the people of power, the people who had prestige, the ones that we looked up to, the people who led our institutions, they began to pronounce it without an R.

They lost their roticity.

They lost their R in certain situations, after certain vowels, in certain words.

It’s not that you don’t pronounce the R’s.

You either pronounce them differently or you don’t pronounce them in just a certain class of words.

And you’ve got vowel changes that go along with that R change.

For example, you probably say carry instead of carry.

So this persisted well up through the early 1900s up to the period of World War II where after the war this accent loses its prestige.

It loses its association with the Boston Brahmins.

It loses its association with people of class and money and style of education.

Yeah, I’m thinking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yeah, because there was a period before World War II where this was the accent that was taught to people who were in film and radio.

It wasn’t perfectly like the Boston accent, but it was close.

And they did certain things with their ahs.

Father might be more of a thing that you’d say.

It’s not Scots.

It’s not Irish.

It actually comes to us from the educated class in the UK.

It’s called RP, Received Pronunciation.

And actually, the artlessness in the UK is actually also kind of a modern invention as well.

It didn’t used to exist as well.

Somehow, the people in power were able to adopt this accent, and it became the thing to speak.

We tend to speak like the people we respect and the people who control our worlds.

And in that way, an accent spreads.

So it’s not usually going to rise from the bottom up.

It’s going to drop from the top down.

And so that accent then moved to the power centers of the United States, New York City, and Boston.

And then they took a stronghold among the educated classes there.

Those also tended to be the moneyed classes and the elected classes.

And in that way, the accent became a thing to emulate by strivers and people who wanted to look or act as if they were on a higher social scale than they’d been born to.

So that’s really the short version of it.

Well, it’s good to know that it had a beginning and that it’s slowly fading, it appears, like you say, in all the states.

So I’ll just keep on.

Yeah, I’d hang on to it, Pat. I think it’s charming.

I do, too.

Thank you for calling.

Okay, thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

I should say that there’s one place where R-lessness, that is, the tendency not to use an R after a vowel in certain words, is increasing.

And that is in the speech of young African Americans.

So we have different trends happening among different speech communities, different conventions taking hold.

I love this.

Pat’s accent probably will become archaic at some point.

Right.

Yeah.

And it’s kind of already happened in New York City.

The New York City accent from the 1930s is really hard to find now.

And it’s kind of more generalized to a regional accent.

And that’s the way language goes.

And that’s what we love watching and listening to and talking about.

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