Map of New England Places Everybody Pronounces Wrong
As part of the 30 Day Map Challenge, Maxwell Howe created a map of New England places that many out-of-towners mispronounce (Instagram). As you would expect when you start talking about local pronunciations and accents, he’s getting some blowback:
Youâre mixing accent with correct pronunciation. Itâs only WUH-stah if you have a non-rhotic accent. If a non-native dropped that instead of âWUH-sterâ in conversation theyâd sound like an asshat. Same with Lem-in-ster et al. You do this correctly when you write Concord as CON-kerd, where the local accent would have it sound like âCON-kidââŚ. We expect the accent on the first syllable, but not for the R to drop. Source: native new englander with a rhotic accent.
Growing up in the Midwest, we had plenty of our own place names like this: Madrid (MAD-rid) and What Cheer (WATCH-ear) in Iowa were two of my favorites.
As a baseball card collector in my teens, I was familiar with the Rhode Island city of Pawtucket from the minor league stats listings on the backs of the cards of Red Sox players (Pawtucket is the Sox’s AAA team). My friends and I pronounced it like it looked. It was only when I went to a Red Sox game like 15 years ago that I overheard a guy talking about some prospect coming up from Puh-TUCK-it (he made it sound like a single syllable somehow) that my eyes went wide and my brain exploded. That’s how you pronounce it?
Comments 3
This kind of thing is so fascinating to me, how we make sense of words and sounds, and how that can signify belonging or otherness.Â
I've lived in the greater Seattle area for decades now and have yet to hear anyone from outside the region get the name of this town right: Puyallup. Heck, *I* still stumble on it, I think because it's an atypical combination of vowel sounds in English (because of course it isn't of English origin).
I grew up in one of the Massachusetts towns that appear on the map, and the comment you clipped out about the difference between the stress (dialect?) and the rhoticity (accent) is right on. I don't have the classic dropped-r accentâalthough I can put it on for partiesâand it would stand out from my regular speech if I dropped the end r of Worcester, say. But I always stress it the same way all of us Massholes do.Â
Heâs left out the New England mispronunciation that I take most personally â the tendency for out-of-towners to say âNEW havenâ rather than the locally preferred ânew HAVEN.â Seems subtle, but imagine how discordant it would be to hear someone call the city âNEW york.âÂ
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