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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: it's Christian saga. Here. Warm up your vocal cords, because

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Speaker 1: today we're diving into the history of Boston and New

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Speaker 1: York accents. Now I'm from the Boston area originally in

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Speaker 1: tourists love to ask if they can park the car

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Speaker 1: in Harvard Yard, or rather pack the car and have

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Speaker 1: it yead. This question illustrates the stereotypical Boston accent, whose

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Speaker 1: origins date back to the seventeenth century. Beantown's famous dialect

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Speaker 1: is a melting pot, bearing the influence of Quakers, Puritans,

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Speaker 1: and Algonquin Indians alike. But by far the Boston accents

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Speaker 1: best known quirk is a tendency to drop the R sound.

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Speaker 1: This is exchanged for an ah, turning beer into via.

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Speaker 1: Until recently, historians attributed the custom to good old Anglophilia,

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Speaker 1: supposedly Massachusetts column this we're trying to emulate the high

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Speaker 1: brown norms of England's elite, who always made a point

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Speaker 1: to ditch their rs. However, this explanation might have it backward.

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Speaker 1: The dropped our habit first showed up in southeastern England,

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Speaker 1: where it wasn't originally seen as prestigious in linguist Richard

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Speaker 1: Bailey used phonetically written records to show that the trend

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Speaker 1: later became popular in pre revolutionary Boston, and yet, according

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Speaker 1: to his research, Britain's well off wouldn't embrace the practice

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Speaker 1: until the mid eighteen hundreds. So in other words, it's

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Speaker 1: possible that English socialites were copying Boston and not vice versa.

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Speaker 1: Oh and for what it's worth, Harvard Yard has very

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Speaker 1: strict parking policies, so you might want to leave your

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Speaker 1: vehicle elsewhere. I'm just just telling you that, as was

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Speaker 1: the case in Boston. Though the first English speakers to

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Speaker 1: arrive in the New York region came from the south

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Speaker 1: of England. At some point in the eighteenth century, New

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Speaker 1: Yorkers started dropping there ares even the ones originally from

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Speaker 1: the North of England picked up the habit. This explains

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Speaker 1: why Hyde Park's own Franklin Delano Roosevelt said fia instead

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Speaker 1: of fear during the biggest address of his life. The

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Speaker 1: missing our phenomena began to die down after World War Two,

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Speaker 1: but other norms still persist. Say Long Guyland instead of

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Speaker 1: Long Island, and you'll be pegged for an area native

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Speaker 1: Some believe this little eccentricity could be the product of

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Speaker 1: Yiddish or Italian influence. However, other linguists aren't convinced. Most

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Speaker 1: experts agree that the New York accents basic characteristics are

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Speaker 1: British in origin. What's debatable is the exact degree to

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Speaker 1: which any non English language affected any specific word pronunciations

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Speaker 1: or sentence structures. As such, we may never know where

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Speaker 1: coffee or toy Todd Street came from. Today's episode was

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Speaker 1: written by Mark Mancini, produced by Tristan McNeil and For

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Speaker 1: more on this and other topics, please visit us at

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Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com.