The Origins of Boston and New York’s Accents

What does Boston have against the letter 'R'? BrainStuff digs into the origins of 2 American accents.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
it's Christian saga. Here. Warm up your vocal cords, because
today we're diving into the history of Boston and New
York accents. Now I'm from the Boston area originally in
tourists love to ask if they can park the car
in Harvard Yard, or rather pack the car and have

(00:24):
it yead. This question illustrates the stereotypical Boston accent, whose
origins date back to the seventeenth century. Beantown's famous dialect
is a melting pot, bearing the influence of Quakers, Puritans,
and Algonquin Indians alike. But by far the Boston accents
best known quirk is a tendency to drop the R sound.

(00:47):
This is exchanged for an ah, turning beer into via.
Until recently, historians attributed the custom to good old Anglophilia,
supposedly Massachusetts column this we're trying to emulate the high
brown norms of England's elite, who always made a point
to ditch their rs. However, this explanation might have it backward.

(01:09):
The dropped our habit first showed up in southeastern England,
where it wasn't originally seen as prestigious in linguist Richard
Bailey used phonetically written records to show that the trend
later became popular in pre revolutionary Boston, and yet, according
to his research, Britain's well off wouldn't embrace the practice

(01:33):
until the mid eighteen hundreds. So in other words, it's
possible that English socialites were copying Boston and not vice versa.
Oh and for what it's worth, Harvard Yard has very
strict parking policies, so you might want to leave your
vehicle elsewhere. I'm just just telling you that, as was
the case in Boston. Though the first English speakers to

(01:56):
arrive in the New York region came from the south
of England. At some point in the eighteenth century, New
Yorkers started dropping there ares even the ones originally from
the North of England picked up the habit. This explains
why Hyde Park's own Franklin Delano Roosevelt said fia instead
of fear during the biggest address of his life. The

(02:18):
missing our phenomena began to die down after World War Two,
but other norms still persist. Say Long Guyland instead of
Long Island, and you'll be pegged for an area native
Some believe this little eccentricity could be the product of
Yiddish or Italian influence. However, other linguists aren't convinced. Most

(02:40):
experts agree that the New York accents basic characteristics are
British in origin. What's debatable is the exact degree to
which any non English language affected any specific word pronunciations
or sentence structures. As such, we may never know where
coffee or toy Todd Street came from. Today's episode was

(03:09):
written by Mark Mancini, produced by Tristan McNeil and For
more on this and other topics, please visit us at
how stuff Works dot com.