Boston vs New York City Accents

There are a number of distinctions between vowel sounds between a Boston accent and a New York City accent. One of them really stands out:

This is the very sound distinction that was really standing out to me as an issue in Sacha Baron Cohen's accent in The Trail of the Chicago 7. In that preview, for example, you can hear him say "cops" with a very unrounded vowel - which isn't accurate for the Worchester accent he's going for. That's the major detail that he's missing - otherwise the accent is pretty okay, really, but that's a big issue, and it's the same throughout the movie. (It's not as bad as De Niro's supposed Philly accent in The Irishman, but these are the things that stick in my craw...)

I will say, it wasn't only me. A friend from Worchester went on a rant about it - it's the kind of thing that can really pull a person out of a film. 

Note: There were a couple of dialect coaches listed for individuals in the film. There wasn't one listed for Cohen. C'mon, man.

A transcript of the video:

Hey there, Jim Johnson for AccentHelp.com here. And I want to talk about a big difference between Boston and New York accents because oftentimes people get confused between those.

One of the big keys for this is something I've already done a video on, which I call Hell's Corner. And it's the distinction between the /ɑ/ sound and the /ɔ/ sound, and something that might happen that's kind of in the middle there.

So commonly people think of this as the FATHER sound and the THOUGHT sound. Or, instead of FATHER, actually, JC Wells uses the word PALM, p-a-l-m but most Americans say PALM "palm," so we round it a little bit more. So I tend to go with the word FATHER, which a lot of folks do as well.

So there's a distinction that usually happens for most Americans, for example, between FATHER and THOUGHT where there is some degree of rounding there. Now there are some American speakers, especially in the far north of the US, the Upper Midwest. You can hear this in our Upper Midwest materials. You can hear this where these actually do this sort of a blend, and this is something that's oftentimes called the part of the Great Lakes Vowel Shift, where it's the COT c-o-t CAUGHT c-a-u-g-h-t COT/CAUGHT merger. So that it starts to become more like FATHER THOUGHT COT CAUGHT. I caught, like, "I caught the cot before it fell on the ground." I caught the cot." You will get it where they actually get fully merged.

Okay, now, when we're talking about New York speakers, we get a big difference between these. There tends to be a little bit of rounding that happens on this FATHER and a lot of rounding that happens on this THOUGHT. THOUGHT. And there's a couple of other words that I want to bring up: LOT and CLOTH. Because for most Americans we got a split where LOT belongs with FATHER.

This is true in New York.

FATHER LOT CLOTH THOUGHT. Where you get these really rounded and these much more open, maybe with slight rounding. And this is true of the split that most Americans do: FATHER LOT CLOTH THOUGHT. Just not as much rounding. Again for some speakers in the far Northern US you might get FATHER LOT CLOTH THOUGHT. So you can get them actually all merging together.

Now when you get to Boston, you tend to get a subdivision. So instead of the subdivision being here like it is for New York, you actually kind of get your subdivision here instead, like FATHER heads off on its own and goes towards "father, father." Losing that sense of rounding that you tend to hear in New York accents. But then rounding mildly with LOT CLOTH, putting these right together. And for most Boston speakers, i hear them move this to the very same sound. Sometimes it's a hint more rounded, but oftentimes it becomes FATHER LOT CLOTH THOUGHT. So these all become identical where you hear the big difference is the LOT words and the fact that FATHER tends to be so not rounded, as opposed to New Yorkers where it tends to get a little bit of rounding: FATHER. That's my fah fah... And there's not a lot of true FATHER words.

So most of them - notice these are both spelled with o. Almost all the FATHER-like words that are spelled with an o, those are the ones that get the rounding. And there's the same subdivision here. Now this is spelled o but it's OU. Okay. So if it's spelled with just an o it goes there. Okay. That's as predictable as it gets. B

ut these are the words, save this one that, again, JC Wells tends to use PALM for that are the lexical set words that he uses to subdivide these, and they divide in different ways in different accents.

It's good for you to look at the Hell's Corner clip. The confusion that I just brought up here is part of why I'm like i call it Hell's Corner because it's a little bit of a nightmare. In the same way that some people that i work with have coined the R being Hell's Consonant because there are so many complexities that can happen with the R as well. But that's the big distinction between Boston and New York accents.

And now if you're from one of those places proceed to complain significantly in the comments below. But really, that is probably the biggest distinction between them other than the amount of hate that will happen in the comments below. No. That's probably, you guys are identical in that, maybe. There you go!

For other info about learning accents for actors you can check out the website accenthelp.com.