<p>paying3tuitions, I tell my RI-born-and-raised boss that if she can’t see it from her front porch, it’s too far for her to go. She says that’s not true - but adds that if the drive is longer than 20 minutes, she has to pack a lunch. I am also convinced that everyone in RI knows everyone else in RI. Every time someone new comes into our office, my boss asks them where they’re from. If she finds out they have ever lived in RI, it’s the Spanish Inquisition until she finds someone they know in common. It’s never failed, she always finds SOMEONE they both know - unless people are just pretending they know whoever it is she’s talking about so she’ll leave them alone!</p>
<p>Schmaltz - I think the explanation for why regional accents persist despite the ubiquitous ‘broadcast’ tongue is that we learn the language of our parents. D was in a HS program in Maine, with students from most of the NE states. Not a one spoke in a regional accent, but a few of them could ‘do’ their regional accents - they spoke that way with their parents but had learned to speak ‘broadcast’ in school.</p>
<p>So were Matt Damon’s and Ben Affleck’s accents in Good Will Hunting authentic? I’m thinking yes, since they are both from that area. Then again, they are supposed to be from “Southie,” so maybe that is a different accent from the “typical” Boston accent.</p>
<p>Their accents didn’t ring true to me…they weren’t harsh enough. And don’t get me started on Cliff Clavin on “Cheers.” He’d call his rotund drinking buddy “Nahm,” when it should have been “Nawm.”</p>
<p>Perhaps the boys in “Good Will Hunting” intentionally toned down their accents so the audiences around the country could focus on the plot instead of the accents. When I went through Navy Officer Candidate School, the chief petty officer who taught a class on certain shipboard procedures was from Boston. His accent was so thick, he even had trouble with “R” sounds at the beginning of words, not just the ones at the end of words. For the class session in which we were taught commands to the helmsman, a subsitute teacher mysteriously appeared in his place. Later we learned that previous attempts involving the Bostonian trying to teach students from across the country to say “right full rudder” resulted in very disrespectful eruptions of laughter.</p>
<p>^^^Well, I just looked up Matt Damon’s biography and it states he grew up in Cambridge, Mass. He attended Harvard from 1988-1992 but dropped out to pursue a movie career in L.A. I never knew that about him.</p>
<p>I’m glad it worked out for him, but that close to graduation, I think if I were his mother, I would have wanted to wring his handsome neck for dropping out.</p>
<p>Both Ben and Matt are from Cambridge. They both “lost” their accents for their acting careers, then had to pick up a Southie accent for the movie. I thought they did a pretty good job - one of the scenes in the bar when they were all sitting in a booth and talking rang especially true to me. Ben’s younger brother Casey was in that movie too.</p>
<p>I think Matt was an English major at Harvard. I had a friend who was convinced there was a ghost-writer for that movie, there was no way these two young hunky actors came up with a screenplay that well-written. It wasn’t until she learned that Matt was an English major at Harvard that she was willing to admit that it was possible that they wrote it themselves.</p>
<p>“We drank tonic, said “mum” instead of “mom” and had a “front room” in our house.”</p>
<p>In my house the front room was the “pahlah” and my mother was “Ma”.</p>
<p>This thread is so nostalgic! I heard a distant bell ringing at the mention of calling the school bathroom the “basement”. I’m sure we did that in elementary school. I grew up in a large neighborhood that had the nickname “Maternity Hill” because of the number of children on the street. Summer evenings were filled with games of “Relieveo” and when parents wanted their children home they would stand on the street and SCREAM their names. No child dared ignore that.</p>
<p>Some of my nostalgia isn’t pleasant. I was a 16-year-old midwestern kid who suddenly found himself going to high school in a Boston suburb. Whenever I said anything in class, all the slobbering guys named Sulli and Rocco would laugh their butts off. At the time, I didn’t have enough miles on me to realize that being laughed at by Boston-area folks for the way I talked was about like getting scolded by the president of British Petroleum for the environmental impact of my kitchen sink’s dripping faucet.</p>
<p>No accent? NO ACCENT? You can’t have no accent unless you are unable to speak at all, because there is no “right” way to pronounce English. </p>
<p>As a New Jersey native now living in California, I’m still, after all these years, confused by these impoverished Californians who don’t realize that Dawn and Don don’t have the same name. Nor do Carrie and Kerry. I swear, Californians pronounce those names the same. It’s so peculiar. My Californian husband has an officemate whose name, I always assumed, was Kerry, because he referred to her as Kerry. Turns out, she’s named Carrie. What kind of a useless dialect doesn’t distinguish Don and Dawn? Pathetic.</p>
<p>By the way, just to learn a new word, dialects of English that pronounce syllable-final /r/ are called rhotic, and dialects that don’t are called non-rhotic.</p>
<p>I always assumed, was Kerry, because he referred to her as Kerry. Turns out, she’s named Carrie. What kind of a useless dialect doesn’t distinguish Don and Dawn? Pathetic.</p>
<p>LOL My brother’s name is Don, and we pronounce it the same way as Dawn. </p>
<p>*No accent? NO ACCENT? You can’t have no accent unless you are unable to speak at all, because there is no “right” way to pronounce English. *</p>
<p>i think when people say that they don’t have an accent it is because they pronounce words the same way as those on TV or the movies do (when they aren’t faking an accent).</p>
<p>No, I think it’s people who pronounce the final “r” are “rhotic,” and people who don’t pronounce the final “r” are “people who don’t know how to read.” </p>
<p>Getting lectured on English language pronunciation by somebody fron New Jersey is like taking driving lessons from the captain of the Exxon Valdez.</p>
<p>Schmaltz, I grew up NJ and I resent that remark. People from near NYC might have an accent, but South Jersey and the Western part (near PA) are pretty generic American.</p>
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<p>Amazing! The entire country of England is illiterate.</p>
<p>I can’t believe that this thread is turning into an ahhhgument. lol.</p>
<p>I loved the accents the actors used in the movie Fargo. We walked around our house for days, saying “oh, yaaaaah.” I actually don’t know how to write that phonetically, but if you’ve seen the film, you know what I mean.</p>
<p>My father was no innocent bystander in the accent war (he was from western Pennsylvania, and called balloons “bloons”), but he had a hard time keeping a straight face in church near Boston one Sunday. The priest was giving a sermon on “the law of the Lord,” which repeatedly came out as “the lawr of the Lawd.”</p>
<p>I wasn’t in Massachusetts for kindergarten. Was anybody here in Mass. when you learned your ABCs? Did it really go “…m, n, o, p, q, ah, s, t…”?</p>
<p>Boston doctor: “Open your mouth and say the letter that comes after ‘q.’”</p>
<p>One wonders how many students in the Boston Public Schools who can paint really well end up in special ed classes for autistic kids.</p>
<p>Schmaltz, are you from the west coast? I ask because no Bostonian would have any trouble distinguishing the words “artistic” (which they would say /ahtistic/) and “autistic” (which they would say /awtistic/).</p>
<p>That reminds me of a joke I was told when I moved to the West Coast. It involved a snake who couldn’t multiply; he was an adder. I can’t tell that joke. In my dialect, it doesn’t work.</p>
<p>I was working on rhymes with a child with a strong southern accent. The words were pail and well. He said “pay ell” and “way ell” and told me “Yes, they sure do rhyme Mrs. ________”. I could not argue.</p>
<p>and my mother was “Ma”.</p>
<p>My Chicago-area dad and H called their mothers “maah”</p>
<p>In Calif, we call our mother, “mom”</p>
<p>My PA neighbor calls a creek, a “crick”.</p>
<p>Boston 'burbs: When my son was in kindergarten, they were “writing” little books and illustrating them at the end of the year. This was in the days/age of phonetic spelling, the kids just wrote what they heard/thought and we worried about spelling in first grade. For one of the pages, the kids were supposed to write what their favorite thing in the classroom was. One of the kids, who loved building towers in the “Block Corner” asked the teacher, “What letter makes the uh sound in cawnuh?”</p>