Short-a in Northern New England

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between the Boston speech community and two New Hampshire (NH) speech communities with respect to the phonetic status of short-a. Analysis of twenty-six recordings shows that (1) breaking is more prevalent in New England than previous isoglosses suggest and (2) younger NH speakers are exhibiting a pattern distinct from both Boston and older NH speakers. The author suggests that the latter result is related to migration patterns and geographic attitudes in New England, which may have contributed to dialect leveling in the sense of Kerswill.