Introducing English Linguistics

Michael A.
Michael A. has lived his entire life in Quincy, a suburb immediately south
of Dorchester, one of the many neighborhoods of Boston. His parents
moved to Quincy in the late 1970s from the Charlestown neighborhood of
Boston during a period when there was considerable white flight from
Boston to many of the communities on the south shore. Although Michael
A. plans to apply to a local community college when he graduates from
high school, neither his parents nor his older siblings attended college.
Both of Michael’s parents are second-generation children of Irish immi-
grants to Boston. His father is an electrician and his mother works for the
state of Massachusetts as a clerk in a municipal court. Michael A. speaks
with what locals would describe as a Boston accent. For instance, his
speech is non-rhotic: he does not consistently pronounce post-vocalic /r/,
the sound /r/ preceded by a vowel in the same syllable. As a result, he
would typically pronounce a word such as never as /n
RvE/ rather than
/n
Rv
/ because the final syllable of this word contains the vowel /E/ (com-
monly referred to as schwa); in this context, the following /r/ can be
optionally deleted.
Michael A.’s speech is /r/-less because of the region of the country in
which he resides and the social class of which he is a member. This pro-
nunciation is confined to the eastern seaboard of the United States pri-
marily for historical reasons. The Massachusetts area was one of the earli-
est parts of the United States to be colonized, and the original colonists
The social context of English
71

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brought with them their speech patterns, in this case the omission of
post-vocalic /r/. Ironically, in Modern British English, Michael A.’s pronun-
ciation of never is Standard British English, so-called RP (received pronun-