For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and “New England accents” are very well known in popular imagination. But since the 1930s, no large-scale academic book project has focused specifically on New England English. While other research projects have studied dialect features in various regions of New England, this is the first large-scale scholarly project to focus solely on New England English since the Linguistic Atlas of New England. This book presents new research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, p ... More

For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and “New England accents” are very well known in popular imagination. But since the 1930s, no large-scale academic book project has focused specifically on New England English. While other research projects have studied dialect features in various regions of New England, this is the first large-scale scholarly project to focus solely on New England English since the Linguistic Atlas of New England. This book presents new research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, phonetic, and statistical analysis of data collected from over 1,600 New Englanders. The book covers the past, present, and future of New England dialect features, analyzing them with dialect maps and statistical modeling in terms of age, gender, social class, ethnicity, and other factors. The book reports on a recent large-scale data collection project that included 367 field interviews, 626 audio-recorded interviews, and 634 online written questionnaires. Using computational methods, the project processed over 200,000 individual vowels in audio recordings to examine changes in New England speech. The researchers also manually examined 30,000 instances of /r/ to investigate “r-dropping” in words like “park” and so on. The book also reviews other recent research in the area. Using acoustic phonetics, computational processing, detailed statistical analyses, dialect maps, and graphical illustrations, the book systematically documents all of the major traditional New England dialect features, other regional features, and their current usage across New England.