Re: Speaking like a Maine-ah
In reply to Lisa’s post about Maine phonology/phonetics:
I’m no dialectologist, and I know little about other North New England dialects, but since my father’s a second-generation Mainer (or “Maineac,” as he insists) and the only one of his family to move out of the state, I’ve had a lot of exposure to the speech of Penobscot County. I often had difficulty understanding my cousins and remember well a game of Operation that was stalled by my failure to recognize “charley horse.”
What has always struck me as most distinctive about Maine phonology/phonetics is the quality of stressed vowels followed by unpronounced orthographic <r>s. The vowel is much more different from the Standard American English vowel than it is in, say, Boston. For example (all vowels approximate!):
