Susan Orlean
AS MOST LINGUISTS might tell you, regional accents are a lot like underpants. Everyone has them, and usually no one notices his or her own, but the world would be a very different place in their absence. This is particularly true in Boston, where we speak the kind of stunningly bizarre burr to which we, of course, pay no heed but that freezes non–New Englanders in their uninflected tracks. Quite simply, it is the Case of the Missing R. We have a number of vocalic peculiarities, but the heart of the Boston brogue is the peculiar disappearance of that very popular letter in the alphabet. With the exception of Cardiff, Wales, which for some reason has an accent nearly identical to ours, Boston is the only city in the world where the exclamation “Bob’s shot!” can mean Bob either has been hit by a stray bullet or is suffering from a height deficiency.
Like the majority of our eccentric habits (such as eating boiled foods and driving badly), losing our R’s is an English affectation. Since 1798, when it was first reported that the rage in London was to go R-less, Englishmen have been dawdling in the pahk and walking their mad dogs in the ahftahnoon sun. Another linguistic fancy at the time was the Broad-A Class. Snobby British prep schools trained their charges to pronounce certain—but not all—words with A’s in an exaggeratedly languorous fashion. Thus, a word like “laugh,” ordinarily pronounced laff, became lahhhf. This pronunciation helped the members of the Broad-A Class sound bored and rich. The final quirk in the accent appealed to the circumspect, irritable side of the British personality: the Great Vowel Shift, which made words like “cot” and “caught” sound the same. Thus, everyone could pronounce them so that no one could understand what anyone was saying.
The five big Tory cities in the United States—Boston, New York, Savannah, Charleston, and Richmond—were settled by people who thought this intonation was just great, and their enthusiasm made for the accents that have persisted today. Each city was later influenced by different waves of immigrants, which is why Bostonians are rarely mistaken for citizens of Savannah. The fact is, Bostonians are rarely mistaken for anything other than Bostonians because no one loses R’s, broadens A’s, and shifts vowels as we do. Remember, Bostonians are a tidy people: we don’t ditch our R’s into the linguistic equivalent of a black hole—we just move them to inappropriate places in other words. For instance, everyone reads about the Caribbean; only Bostonians read about Cuber. And when we read, we get idears.
Within the Boston elocution are distinct variations, but each is clearly part of this amazing whole. There’s the pure Anglophilic Brahmin trill; the proto-nasal Dorchester chop; the wheezy Revere; the absent-minded Harvard twang; and Kennedyspeak, which cobbles together all four and punctuates with carefully considered stammers. But the beauty of the thing is that all of these subsets would agree that it’s no laahfing matta for Liser’s ahnt to be arrested for standing on the connah. Moreover, being not-so-secret xenophobes, we’d also agree that it’s just fine that nonnatives can’t entirely figure out what we’re trying to say.
Which, of course, is the whole point of regional accents and where they part company with underpants. While the latter is a rather private issue, the former is the ultimate in public display and therefore serves as an obvious way to distinguish people who are of this place from people who aren’t. Oh, you can play at being a native—you can boil a dinner and rip around a rotary and dash into the corner spa and make pithy comments about the late mayor Curley—but if you don’t leave your R’s at the door, you might as well be from Ohio. And in that case, as far as Bostonians are concerned, you might as well be from Mahs.