Fuhgeddaboudit

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Ben

Some dialect phrases are so parodied that you question whether they have any basis in reality. Note Irish ‘top o’ the mornin‘ (mostly fiction), Australian ‘g’day‘ (mostly fact), and Cockney ‘guvnor‘ (based in fact, but passé). I would add to this list ‘fuhgeddaboudit,’ a New York Italian-Americanism. You can hear an exaggeration of this idiom at 1:27 in the trailer for the Hugh Grant flop Mickey Blue Eyes:

(I’m confused as to why James Caan is schooling a British RP speaker on the finer points of non-rhotic speech, but anyway …)

‘Fuhgeddaboudit’ seems to have become a pop cultural meme around the time of the 1997 film Donnie Brasco. Here’s a quote from Johnny Depp’s character on the phrase’s meaning in mafia culture:

‘Forget about it’ is like if you agree with someone, you know, like Raquel Welch is one great piece of ass, ‘forget about it.’ But then, if you disagree, like a Lincoln is better than a Cadillac? ‘Forget about it!’ You know? But then, it’s also like if something’s the greatest thing in the world, like mingia those peppers, ‘forget about it.’ But it’s also like saying ‘Go to hell!’ too. Like, you know, like ‘Hey Paulie, you got a one inch pecker?’ and Paulie says ‘Forget about it!’ Sometimes it just means, ‘forget about it.’

Does anyone in New York actually demand that one ‘fuhgeddaboudit?’ It’s a tricky question, since ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ is just a transcription of ‘forget about it.’ And that’s a common phrase in English, after all.

While I’ve never heard someone in New York say ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ specifically, I once heard a man speaking (probably dialectical) Italian in Brooklyn insert the English loan ‘don’t worry about it,’ pronounced rather like dɔn waɹi ba:ɾ et. (Note that ‘bout is pronounced with a:). Although it’s not the same phrase, the anecdote makes me wonder if it’s possible ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ was borrowed by Italian (or Sicilian) speakers, then loaned back to English after accruing hints of foreign inflection and phonology.

But is ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ actually common in New York-Italian speech? Donnie Brasco is based on a non-fiction book of the same name, and a quick Google Books search of the text yields dozens of ‘forget about its.’ That being said, I couldn’t find anything like Depp’s semantics lesson in the book. Has anyone heard an authentic ‘fuhgeddaboudit?’

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Mother Goose Rhymes (When Accents Collide)

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Ben

Humpty DumptyYears ago, I was in a pub discussing a subject I can’t recall. A Dublin acquaintance asked a question that sounded like ‘Was he in coat?’

‘In coat?’ Was this a dialect term I’d never heard? Did he mean ‘Was he in a coat?’ Is there a trend toward eliminating articles in Dublin English?

In fact, the intended question was ‘was he in court?’ There is a recessive trait in local Dublin English whereby some /-or/ words (such as ‘court’) are pronounced with the same vowel in ‘coat.’* (Local Dublin is, despite the city’s renown, a somewhat obscure dialect in America, so I wasn’t well-acquainted with this feature at the time.)

This exemplifies a pronunciation in one accent similar to that in another accent. But are there entire sentences like this?

Such phrases might be called ‘Mother goose rhymes,’ after the book Mots D’Heures, Gousses, Rames, which compiles sentences that sound the same in different languages (the French title is pronounced similarly to Mother Goose Rhymes).

I tried to take a stab at thinking up some ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ for English accents. Unfortunately, all I could muster were syntactically and semantically bizarre curios. For example, someone with a Chicago accent might say:

Shay locked a plywood door. Doubt her!
IPA: ʃeɪ la:kt ə plaiwʊd dɔɹ dɑɔɾ ɚ

…which might sound like someone from a rural part of the American South saying …

She liked to play. Would our daughter?
IPA: ʃɪi la:kt tə plaɪ wʊd ɒɹ dɑɒɾɚ

Someone with a Cockney accent, might say:

May thought, “awful beer what Tim pours!”
mæɪ fo:ʔ o:fo biə wəʔ tɪm po:z

…which could sound like someone from Edinburgh saying …

My photo-phobia would impose.
mæɪ fo:ʔo: fo:biə wəd ɘmpo:z

Finally, a situation where two accents are close geographically. Someone from Toronto might say:

Ideas’ll capture leaders, no question.
aɪdɪəz l capʃɚ lidɚz noʊ kwɛsʧn

…while could sound like a Buffalo, NY native saying…

I dazzle cops, surely there’s no question.
ai dɪəzl caps ʃɚli dɚz noʊ kwɛsʧn

(Okay, so I got a little lazy with that last one.)

This is a fun exercise, but there are many problems with the above sentences. First, these pairs only sound the same if you completely disregard prosody. (You have to forget that the ‘-ly’ in ‘surely’ is never stressed.) Second, I freely admit that I’m making a half-hearted attempt at verisimilitude. In order to make these phrases sound the same, I’ve employed generic, exaggerated accents.

And it’s here we see the difference between such experiments with languages and those with accents. The pun in the title of the aforementioned French book works because it relies on very general assumptions about the pronunciation of French and English. Accents, though, are distinguished by subtle phonetic nuances. To get ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ to work, you have to rely on rather theoretical transcriptions that don’t necessarily correspond to how people actually talk.

Anyone else have any good “Mother Goose Rhymes” involving two English accents? (They don’t need to be long sentences.)

*A further explanation: Older accents in Dublin participate in the NORTH/FORCE split. Without getting into the details, this results in certain /or/ words being part of the GOAT set (i.e. the vowel in ‘goat,’ ‘coat’ and ‘code.’). Because, unlike many other Irish accents, the vowel in GOAT has a diphthongal quality in Dublin, this results in the vaguely twangy pronunciation of ‘court’ previously mentioned. You’ll also note that the /r/ is dropped; these words seem more conducive to non-rhoticity in strong Dublin accents.

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Yes/No Intonation: The Pennsylvania Question

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Ben
Yes or No?

wikimedia

I lovingly tease my wife for having the most General of American accents I’ve ever heard. She grew up in an area with a unique dialect (the Philadelphia region), yet betrays little of this upbringing in her speech*. Except, that is, for one possible giveaway which I’ll call the Pennsylvania Question.

In much of America, if you ask someone a yes/no question like ‘Is it warm outside?’ the intonation will inevitably go up at the end, sounding roughly like this:

———————————side——–
———————–out——————-
———–warm—————————-
Is it—————————————–

In parts of Pennsylvania, however, the intonation sometimes does something different. It falls after the stressed word in the sentence:

————-warm———————
——it———————————
Is————————-outside—–

(Don’t you phoneticists rush at once to steal my WordPress-Friendly Intonation Transcription system.)

My first impression of the pattern was that it sounded like an American who’s enjoyed a spell overseas. British RP and Southeast England treat yes/no questions quite similarly in certain contexts. (Phonetician Esther Grabe has found this pattern in London and Cambridge; less so in Northern England). But after attending a few events in Western Pennsylvania, the phenomenon’s state-specific nature became more obvious.

I found that a few scholarly works (e.g. this one) passingly mention a specific source for falling intonation in Pennsylvania: German. Tellingly, in her paper The Pennsylvania German English: The language of the Pennsylvania Germans, linguist Kirsten Vera van Rhee attests to a falling intonation among PA German English-speakers in ‘did it bother you?’ and ‘don’t it fit?’

But this raises a few questions. First, this is to my knowledge one of the few instances where PA German has a noticeable influence on PA English. By contrast, Germanic languages bear an unmistakeable stamp on the accents of the Upper Midwest. Yet despite German being still spoken natively in PA, its impact on the phonetics and phonology of Pennsylvania English seems limited. So why this one feature?

I’m also unclear as to the geographic provenance of this pattern. I’ve personally noticed it in the speech of folks from the Western Suburbs of Philly and areas of Western and Central PA, but I’m not entirely sure if it extends into the cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia themselves.

Where is this intonation pattern found? Are there other instances of German influence in Pennsylvania accents?

*Side note: Dawson’s Creek fans may remember actor Kerr Smith, who played Jack on the show. He grew up near my wife, attending the same high school, yet unlike her has an unmistakeable Philly accent (an obvious tense/lax split for TRAP words, advanced fronting of the GOOSE and GOAT vowels, etc.). Strange how people can grow up in the same area in America, under near-identical socioeconomic circumstances, yet speak very differently. Also, I have watched way too much Dawson’s Creek lately.

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Hond Begs: Belfast /a/ Allophony

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Ben
Belfast Mural

Titanic Mural, Belfast

Inner-city Belfast is one of the trickiest accents for the average American to understand. Confusing factors include the unique intonation (everything sounds like a question to my ears) and diphthongs (‘bite‘ sounds like American ‘bait‘).

Yet the Belfast ‘short-a‘ is one of the most serious comprehension barriers. Whereas Americans pronounce words like ‘trap‘ and ‘cat‘ with one or two vowel allophones*, such words have a whopping five variations in Belfast.

And not just minor variations, either! The title of this post references the broad Belfast pronunciation of ‘hand bags,’ with ‘hand’ pronounced close to the American vowel in ‘lawn,’ and ‘bag’ close to American ‘beg’ (hɔnd bɛgz).** Other /a/-variants in Belfast include the æ typical of American ‘cat,’ the a typical of Northern English ‘cat,’ and the ɑ as in British RP ‘can’t.’

Are there rules for which /a/ word is assigned to which vowel? James Milroy, who studies Belfast sociolinguistics, notes some generalizations***. Words that end in /g/, /ng/, /sh/ and sometimes /k/ have a front or even raised realization (hence ‘bag’ = ‘beg’). Certain words ending in /n/ are back and sometimes rounded (hence ‘hand’ = ‘hond’ and ‘man’ = ‘mon’). Other /a/ words have the centralized vowel typical of much of Ireland and Northern England. But there is tremendous variation, with numerous exceptions and quirky little rules.

So what’s with all the different /a/’s? One might expect it has something to do with vowel lengthening rules. As in Scotland, Northern Irish English has a pattern of long vs. short vowels depending on their phonological environment. But these rules don’t offer us much help here: as per John Wells, the Northern Irish /a/ in words like ‘trap’ is long unless it comes before /p/, /t/, /k/ or /ʧ/. This obviously doesn’t explain the Belfast pattern.

Other dialects offer interesting parallels, however. The fronted or raised /a/ before /g/ (as in the ‘bag’=’beg’ thing) suggests a phenomenon called ‘velar pinching.’ One finds something similar in Western North American accents, where ‘bag’ and ‘bang’ are pronounced with an /ɛ/ or an /eɪ/. Why this ‘pinching’ pops up in such different parts of the English-speaking world is a mystery.

Meanwhile, the pronunciation of words like ‘hand’ with a back and/or rounded vowel is attested in Glasgow****. I’m not sure what the connection is, but as Northern Ireland and Scotland have historical and linguistic ties, this is not surprising.

So perhaps Belfast /a/ is so inconstant because of its many influences: Scottish English, Ulster Scots, various types of Hiberno-English and perhaps some English regional dialects as well. Urban English in general exhibits a lot of variation in the ‘trap’ vowel (note also New York and London). Belfast is especially extreme, but not unprecedentedly so.

*An allophone is, roughly speaking, an alternate way of pronouncing the same basic sound.

**Since ‘hand bag’ is arguably a compound, I’m not entirely sure about this. I’m just using it as a theoretical example.

***Milroy, P. (1991). The interpretation of social constraints on variation in Belfast English. In J. Cheshire (Ed.), English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

****Stuart-Smith, J. (2004). Scottish English: Phonology. In B. Kortmann & E. W. Schneider (Eds.), A handbook of the varieties of English. Berlin: Mouten De Gruyter.

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The ‘Near’ Monophthong or the ‘Near’ Diphthong

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Ben

In non-rhotic accents, words like ‘near‘ and ‘fear‘ generally exhibit two pronunciation patterns: either a ‘centering’ diphthong (ɪə), which might crudely be transcribed ‘ih-uh;’ or as a monophthong, which is usually a lengthened version of the vowel in ‘kit‘ (ɪ:).

But which accents use the monophthong, and which the diphthong? In fact, there’s a lot of variability from speaker to speaker.

For example, I’ve heard broad, Tony Soprano-esque impressions of the New York City accent with exaggerations like ‘whaddaya doin’ hih!’ (that last word is hɪ:, like ‘hit’ without the ‘t’). But in reality, I’ve rarely heard authentic sentences like that in the Big Apple. I usually find that New York ‘here’ has the diphthong hɪə.

I’ve heard Australian accents in which ‘beer‘ sounds nearly like ‘bee.’ This results from the tenseness of the Aussie vowel in ‘kit’ combining with the monopthongization of the ‘eer’ vowel. Hence ‘I’ll have another pint of bee!’ (bi:) But there’s quite a bit of variation in Australia, with some speakers more inclined toward iɪ or the more broad iə.

In the aforementioned accents, the monophthong is probably a possibility, but not as widespread as one might think. Yet in Southeast England, monophthongal ‘near’ does seem preferred by many speakers. A piece of anecdotal evidence: the International Dialects of English Archive transcribes the speech of two suburban Londoners who both have a monophthong or greatly weakened diphthong* for the final vowel in ‘idea‘ (usually the same vowel as ‘near’ in non-rhotic accents).

Yet as if in reaction to this trend, some urban Londoners have a strongly diphthongal ‘-ear’ vowel. Two celebrity examples I’ve noticed are Adele and Idris Elba, both with accents located near the Cockney/Estuary border. In words like ‘here,’ both have a very pronounced diphthong: where ‘ee-uh’ is a crude approximation in most cases, it’s actually fairly accurate here (iə).

It also seems possible for an accent to have a mixture of both types of pronunciations. My earlier impressions pertain to situations where the vowel appears in a prominent position. But I can see how a New Yorker might use a monophthong in the phrase ‘I feared the worst’ (i.e. with the vowel occurring in the middle of a phrase and before a consonant), but use a diphthong in the phrase ‘that’s a serious fear‘ (i.e. with the vowel at the end of a phrase). It’s just so variable.

For you non-rhotic speakers out there, do you use a monophthong, a diphthong, or both?

*Both are centralized as well, and the ‘weakened diphthong’ is of the type ɘə.

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Take / Have a Bath

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Ben
Claire Anderson

Silent film actress Claire Anderson.

Differences between American and British English constitute a set of near-cliched contrasts (‘we say elevator, while you say lift!’). I would add to this list the ‘have a bath/take a bath‘ distinction: the British ‘have‘ a bath, while we Americans ‘take‘ one. A hackneyed metaphor for American assertiveness and British passivity is lurking in there somewhere.

‘Have’ and ‘take’ are examples of ‘delexical verbs,‘ which create an ‘implied’ verb suggested by the noun. Rather than saying ‘she bathed,’ we opt for ‘have/take a bath.’   Also ‘take a nap,’ ‘have a rest,’ or ‘take a vacation,’ which substitute for the verbs ‘nap,’ ‘rest’ and, uh, ‘vacate.’

To be fair, I can’t say if ‘take a bath’ is completely verboten in British English. But it’s striking how rarely Americans use ‘have.’ Many of my country(wo)men may object, ‘I can totally see myself saying have a bath.’ Yet Brigham Young University’s Corpus of Contemporary American English yields a mere two spoken occurences of this type, both in British contexts (one an interview with English actor Jeremy Northam).

Of course, Americans frequently use delexical ‘have.’ Note ‘have a party,’ ‘have a meeting,’ ‘have a soiree,’ ‘have a rendevous,’ ‘have a shindig.’ For reasons that are unclear, many of these seem related to socializing. So Americans say ‘have a shower’ if they are talking about a wedding shower, but (usually) don’t say ‘have a shower’ when referring to getting clean. Not sure if this constitutes a pattern, but it’s a striking trend.

But what is the pattern, anyway? What’s especially confusing are the various situations where both ‘take’ and ‘have’ can apply to a verb. Why can Americans ‘have a meeting’ or ‘take a meeting*’, but not ‘take a party?’ Why can we both ‘have a drink’ and ‘take a drink’ (the latter usually in the context of ordering said drink), but not ‘take a meal.’ And why do we invariably say we are ‘taking a trip,’ yet bid au revoir with the obligatory ‘have a nice trip?’

*Less common, but found in Hollywood-ish phrases like ‘I hear Spielberg took a meeting with Tom Cruise.’

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Pronunciation Mysteries: ‘Cinema’ and ‘Theatre’

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Ben
Cinema

wikimedia

Today’s post can be filed in the ‘questions I don’t have answers to’ box.  Two words, closely related by subject, exhibit unusual variation in dialects of English. Both, incidentally, involve going to the movies:

1.) Theatre (or theater).* In General American English and related accents, ‘theatre’ can be pronounced so that it rhymes perfectly with ‘feeder’ (θiɾɚ). This contrasts with the pronunciation in British RP (and other non-rhotic Englishes, such as New England) where the first syllable is more of a diphthong lax vowel, almost rhyming with ‘fear the’ (θɪətə). Both pronunciations make sense given the patterns of their respective dialects.

But there is a third pronunciation heard in both Ireland and The American South, in which the word is pronounced as if it were the two separate words ‘the ater‘ (θi eɪtə(r)). That is, the ‘e’ and ‘a’ in the first half of the word are treated as two separate syllables.

Is this a spelling pronunciation? Does it predate the other two more common variants? And besides the two places I mentioned earlier, where else is this pronunciation common?

2.) Cinema. Most British dictionaries list a pronunciation of ‘cinema’ identical to the American version: sɪnəmə (i.e. ‘sin-uh-muh’). But another very common British variant is to pronounce the final syllable of this word with the ‘broad-a’ in ‘father:’ sɪnəmɑ: (i.e. ‘sin-uh-mah’).

John Wells wrote a post about this topic some years back, but had few answers. Is ‘cinema’ perhaps an attempt to match the French pronunciation of the word? (An interesting exception to the general rule that the British try to Anglicize French words where Americans make a vague attempt to preserve the original pronunciation). Or is there something else at play here?

I welcome all theories.

*Just to clear up a common misconception: It’s perfectly acceptable in America to use the ostensibly ‘British’ spelling of ‘theatre’ with a final ‘-re.’ I believe there is a vague rule to the effect that we reserve the ‘-re’ for descriptions of ‘theatre’ as an art form, but use ‘theater’ to describe individual auditoriums.

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Adverbial ‘Wicked’

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Ben

Increase Mather SermonGrowing up in a rural part of New England, ‘wicked‘ was a common staple of the local vocabulary. Not ‘wicked,’ mind you, as in the sense of ‘sinful’ or ‘evil.’ New Englanders convert this adjective to an adverb, creating a synonym for ‘very.’ Relevant examples include:

That boy’s wicked smart!

Or, in an appropriately New England context:

It’s wicked cold outside!

The origins of this Yankee-ism are unclear. Some years back, a Bostonian friend suggested the fanciful notion that ‘wicked’ is a way of exorcising the demons of the Salem Witch trials. This is little more than amusing folklore (although Cotton and Increase Mather used ‘wicked’ in their share of sermon titles). Still, there is an old-fashioned ring to adverbial ‘wicked’ that prompts one to look for pre-20th-century origins.

Generally speaking, the conversion of adjectives into adverbs seems a common feature of older American speech. Take the word ‘terrible.’ A quick Google Books search reveals such 19th-Century uses as:

It is a terrible cold frost, and snow fell yesterday, which still remains …
I have thought it a terrible queer thing …
We had terrible hard fighting on the 13th …

If anything, ‘wicked’ appears to be one of the last survivors of this class in American English. (Although this trend seems to be reemerging: Note contemporary slang uses of ‘crazy,’ as in ‘This is crazy delicious!’)

Yet I can find few 19th-Century examples of ‘wicked’ being used this way. Certainly not in New England: I can locate no such ‘wickeds’ in the work of Alcott, nor in Hawthorne, nor in Melville (a New Yorker, but admissible to the New England literary pantheon on the strength of Moby Dick).

So where does this most New England of terms come from?

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Right Thurr

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Ben

A few years back, the rapper Chingy had a hit track entitled Right Thurr. The chorus goes something like this (forgive the awkward transcription):

I like the way you do that right thurr,
Switch your hips when you’re walkin’, let down your hurr,
I like the way you do that right thurr,
Lick your lips when you’re talkin’, that make me sturr.

To get the full effect of the saliency of ‘thurr,’ check out the music video:

What’s with the pronunciation of words like ‘stare’ and ‘there’ with an ‘urr’ (ɚ) sound, you may ask? Some varieties of African-American Vernacular English exhibit a shift whereby such ‘-are/ere/air’ words (i.e, the SQUARE set) are pronounced with something like the ‘r-colored’ vowel in General American ‘nurse.’ Hence ‘there’ becomes ‘thurr’ and ‘hair’ becomes ‘hurr.’

This phenomenon seems to be in the early stages of academic recognition. Erik R. Thomas, a linguist who has studied AAVE extensively, has but this to say in his Phonological and phonetic characteristics of African-American Vernacular English*:

A recent development reported for some AAE (in Memphis, but likely found elsewhere) is centralization of the square and near vowels so that they approach or possibly merge with the nurse vowel (Hinton and Pollock 2000; Pollock 2001). Examples that Pollock (2001) gives are bear [b] and here [h].

So what’s going on here? Let’s turn to a different region of the world for a possible clue: Dublin, Ireland. Raymond Hickey, a linguist who studies Hiberno-English, notes a similar shift in middle-class Dublin accents in which the vowel in ‘square’ is pronounced (as in AAVE) with a vowel similar to American ‘nurse.’**

Hickey suggests this is due to a kind of hypercorrection, or an attempt to ‘correct’ a local dialect feature which takes this correction a bit ‘too far.’ Essentially, class-conscious Dubliners, trying to avoid the vernacular Dublin pronunciation of a word ‘early’ (it is pronounced something like AIR-ly), make the ‘mistake’ of lumping words like ‘square’ into the same set. Hence they pronounce ‘care’ and ‘cur’ nearly the same way.

My only guess for how this might relate to African-American English is that it’s one of America’s non-rhotic (r-less) dialects. Is it possible that, for African-Americans attempting to speak rhotic English, they somehow make the same hypercorrective ‘mistake’ that Hickey’s Dubliners do? Or is something else at play here?

*Thomas, E. R. (2007). Phonological and phonetic characteristics of African-American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 450-471.

**Source: Hickey, R. (2002). Dissociation as a form of language change. European Journal of English Studies, 4, 303-315.

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Father-Bother in New England

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Ben

New Hampshire and VermontWhen people think of New England accents, they tend to think of the fronted /a/ in words like ‘start’ and ‘car‘ (as in ‘pahk yuh car in Hahvuhd yahd’). This /a/ can sound to outsiders somewhat like the ‘a’ in ‘trap. So if a Bostonian says:

The dog’s bark.

…it might sound to the uninitiated like…

The dog’s back.

This fronted /a/ is also found in ‘broad a’ words like ‘father,’ ‘palm’ and ‘Utah.’ Which brings us to the topic of today’s post.

As I’ve mentioned before, many aspects of New England speech are receding rapidly. (You hear far more r’s among young people in Maine, Boston and Providence than you would have forty years ago.) A new study in American Speech, Farewell to the founders, looks at how the fronted /a/ has changed as well. And the results are slightly surprising.

A noticeable feature of New England accents is the preservation of the ‘Father-Bother’ split. That is to say, in most other American accents, ‘Father’ and ‘bother’ are perfect rhymes, pronounced most commonly with the unrounded ɑ (the same vowel in words like ‘lot’ and ‘cod’). But in traditional New England accents, ‘bother’ tends to be a back vowel (ɒ), while ‘father’ has the aforementioned fronted a.

The American Speech study sampled the speech of a group of natives of the New Hampshire/Vermont border. Being located right on the traditional boundary between Eastern and Western England, it’s a good place for discerning how speech has changed from one generation to the next.

The researchers, unsurprisingly, find that speakers over 60 preserve the FATHER-BOTHER split, while for younger speakers under 23, these two vowels are merged.  What this means, I’m assuming, is that ‘father’ is pronounced with a back vowel like many other American accents.

But here’s where things get interesting: the researchers find that the vowel in words like ‘start,’ ‘car‘ and ‘Harvard’ remains fronted among younger New Englanders. So while this group has shifted the ‘broad a’ in words like ‘father,’ this has not happened for words that end in ‘r.’

Although the article is about Northern New England, I’ve noticed this peculiarity among young middle-class Bostonians as well. ‘Car’ tends to be pronounced with the rather Chicago-like [kaɹ], but you won’t find the fronted vowel in words like ‘Utah,’ where it would stick out like a sore thumb. (Especially in words like ‘Utah,’ which end in /a/: I’m always startled by the traditional New England pronunciation, which sounds almost like ‘you tack’ with the final /k/ removed.)

Why does ‘r change things? Quoth the article:

…even as young speakers are assiduously committed to avoiding salient eastern New England variants, they may “overlook” less stigmatized features. Crucially, this is likely to occur in postvocalic-r words, such as START…we suggest that the young speakers (consciously or unconsciously) have a sense that their rhotic pronunciations will sufficiently “cleanse” such words of traditional eastern variants.

In a nutshell, because these young New Englanders have converted completely* from non-rhotic to rhotic, their rhoticity in a word like ‘start’ might be said to ‘distract’ them from the fronted /a/. Does this seem plausible? Or is there another reason why young New Englander’s might preserve the traditional vowel in ‘start’ (albeit while adding an ‘r’), but not in words like ‘father?’

*The word ‘completely’ is intentional here: the study’s subjects find that, among the younger participants, they are nearly 100% rhotic.

Source: Stanford, J. N., Leddy-Cecere, T. A., & Baclawski, K. P. (2012). Farewell to the founders: Major dialect changes along the east-west New England border. American Speech, 87, 126-169.

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