Philadelphia accent

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The Philadelphia accent, the accent of American English spoken in and around Philadelphia, varies among different ethnic groups and to a minor extent among different neighborhoods. Unlike most accents heard in most part of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia accent is very closely identical to the New York-New Jersey English. The general phonological features of the accent, however, are as follows:

On is pronounced /ɔn/, so that, as in the South and Midland varieties of American English (and unlike New York and the northern U.S.) it rhymes with dawn rather than don.^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}
The /oʊ/ of goat and boat is fronted, so it is pronounced [ɞʊ], as in the Midland and South (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 144).
As in New York-New Jersey English and Australian English, the phoneme /æ/ has split into two phonemes, so that Philadelphians have different vowels for example in mad and sad. Fewer words have the "tense" phoneme, /eə/ in Philadelphia than in New York City; for more details on both the Philadelphia and New York systems see phonemic æ-tensing in the Mid-Atlantic region.
As in New York, Boston, and most accents of English outside North America, there is a three-way distinction between Mary, marry, and merry. However in Philadelphia some speakers have a merger of /ɛ/ and /ʌ/ before /r/ (the furry-ferry merger), so that merry is merged instead with Murray. Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006: 54) report that about one third of Philadelphia speakers have this merger, one third have a near-merger, and one third keep the two distinct.
Canadian raising occurs for /aɪ/ (as in price) but not for /aʊ/ (as in mouth) (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 114-15, 237-38). The vowel in mouth often has a very front starting point, and may be realized as [ɛɔ], something like a glide from the vowel of dress to that of thought (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 237).
There is a split of /eɪ/ (face) so at the end of a word (for example, day) it has an open starting point and is similar to the [æɪ] found in Australian and New Zealand English, while in any other position (for example, date) it is pronounced more like [i] (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 237). Pairs of words which may be confused as a result of this development include eight and eat, snake and sneak, slave and sleeve.

References

External links

[An informal interpretation and discussion of the Philadelphia accent]

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