New York Times declares Boston accent dying because Michael Bloomberg no longer has one
By adamg - Thu, 09/03/2009 - 12:17pm.
Also seems to take umbrage that Bostonians wouldn't accept William Buckley or Katherine Hepburn as having a Boston accent.
Because, um, they didn't?
The article, which acknowledges halfway down that many people thought Ted Kennedy had a "Kennedy" accent, rather than a Boston one, also has a handy pronunciation guide for morons:
For many Bostonians with the accent, the r is replaced by "ah" or "aw" when the letter follows a vowel: "Color" becomes "cuh-lah," "square" becomes "skway-ah," and, of course, "car" becomes "caah." The letter a, meanwhile, is often pronounced broadly: "father" becomes "faaa-thah," and so on.
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Bill Buckley and Katharine Hepburn
William F. Buckley was a native New Yorker and never lived in Boston, so I guess I don't know how anybody could say he had a Boston accent. Similarly, Katharine Hepburn was from Hartford.
What Buckley, Hepburn and Kennedy all have in common is a patrician accent that was common to the wealthy of the Northeast in their early years.
Jack Kennedy's accent was closer to a Boston accent, what with "Cuber" and "Chiner" and what-have-you, but still more influenced by a youth spent in private school than Boston.
The Sunday New York Times
The Sunday New York Times Magazine did a feature a few years ago on the Buckley/Hepburn accent. Evidently, the editors don't read their own material.
First Off....
There's no such thing as a "Boston Accent". We speak properly and the rest of the country has corrupted the English language that was passed on to them.
PBS ran a special years ago "The Story of English"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_English
and they explain that the English language traveled over from England on the Mayflower. It was when it left Boston that the rest of the country bastardized it.
Second, why would Michael Bloomberg sound like a Bostonian? He spent his formative years in Medford.
Third, it's a good thing he gets around to admitting that Kennedy's had "Kennedy Accents".
C'mon now...
Well, that's just nonsense. Languages and dialects evolve over time, and there's nothing to suggest that people in Boston today speak the way people did in Cromwellian England. The local dialect is as much as accent as the one people use in the South, or in, you know, ENGLAND. There is really no such thing as unaccented English beyond the carefully de-regionalized accent that newscasters and other announcers affect.
And are you seriously going to quibble about the difference between Boston and Medford? The "Boston" accent is spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts; it's not like there's some magic that happens when you drive over the Tobin Bridge.
The Medford accent is
The Medford accent is different from the Boston accent but is very similar. Either way he does not have either one at the moment.
Also yes in the old centers of these cities and towns in MA a body of water did mean the difference between accents. Water creates a natural barrier which meant it affected the casual transfer of accents from one local area to the next.
The magic that happens when you drive over the Tobin Bridge
Often, some of your money disappears.
Thou kidests us!
Oh, so Bostonians speak as those on the Mayflower did.
Yep. Elizabethan english ... um ... plus some Irish accents, Italian inputs, and 400 or so years.
The only way languages fail to change is through isolation. Ever have a collegue from France gush about how neat the "antique" French spoken in Quebec sounds to their ears? Boston had a lot more infuences on the accent than Olde English!
I Am Teasing
But don't you get a little tired of people constantly remarking on the local dialect?
Permanent English Settlements
You forget that the English made their first permanent settlement in what is now the United States in 1607 in Virginia. The second permanent English settlements was made in 1609 in Massachusetts.
So, this might give reason as to why the accents of the South are so varied and poignantly different from those of the North.
A Boston accent? Ted Kennedy
A Boston accent? Ted Kennedy was born in New York.
Kennedy was born at St.
Kennedy was born at St. Margaret's Hospital in the Dorchester section of Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald, who were both members of prominent Irish-American families in Boston[2] and who constituted one of the wealthiest families in the nation.[3]
What?
Wasn't Ted born in Dorchester? St. Margaret's, right? Not that where he was born matters when talking about an accent anyway...
The family moved to New York
The family moved to New York in 1927. Ted was born in 1932. He may have been born at St Margaret's, but the family was in New York when he was a young child. He did spent time in Massachusetts private schools - he seemed to change schools every year. Those schools would have included very few - if any - Boston residents.
where are you getting this
where are you getting this stuff? Ted Kennedy born in New York. Massachusetts prep schools having few if any Boston residents in the 1930s. Do you just shoot from the hip making stuff up and then scramble to find scant facts to cover your ass as thinly as possible afterwards?
Kennedy is an older Bostonian
Kennedy was born at St. Margaret's Hospital in the Dorchester section of Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald, who were both members of prominent Irish-American families in Boston[2] and who constituted one of the wealthiest families in the nation.[3]
The difference is that anyone Bostonian or Easter Mass person thats 35 and under knows the difference between their accent and their parents. Kennedy spoke like all of our parents. I'm 28, grew up in and around Boston all my life, joined the Navy and came back. I never lost the accent, I even tried. Biggest difference is when a 55 yr old says Fawty Two (42) and I say Fortee two. Just age is all.
Locuh culuh near the Mystic River
I coincidentally watched Clint Eastwood's Mystic River last night. I had forgotten just how cringesome it was to listen to Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney, and even Laurence Fishburne lash the dialog with locuh culuh.
why are the birthers attacking a deceased senator?
Where is this New York birth coming from? Have you no decency?
William Kemeza of Boston
William Kemeza of Boston College High School (quoted in the article) shouldn't find it strange that “. . . I think I can hear it even among students whose parents were first generation immigrants — Cape Verdean students talking about the Red Sawx.” My dad's parents came from Poland, and he has somewhat of a Boston (er, East Cambridge) accent to this day in spite of 55+ years in northern NH. By background and class - and probably accent - he as a child was a lot closer to those Cape Verdeans of today than to me, daughter of a college-educated engineer/manager.
(Though a lot has changed in our society in 3/4 century to make the likely course of their lives different than his.)