Boston accent
On the other hand, the Boston accent merges the "short "o"" with the "aw" phoneme: the two classes exemplified by "caught" and "cot" thus both become an often long and rounded , so that "caught", "cot", "law", "wand", "rock", "talk", "doll", and "wall" all are pronounced with the same vowel. By contrast, New York accents and southern New England accents have for "caught" and for "cot" and the London accents have and , respectively. In Boston and some other parts of New England, a few words ending in , e.g., "hot" and "got", can be pronounced with an entirely different phoneme, however, sounding instead like "hut" and "gut", respectively.
Rhoticity in English
Though most English varieties in England are non-rhotic today, stemming from a trend toward this in southeastern England accelerating in the very late 1700s onwards, rhotic accents are still found in the West Country (south and west of a line from near Shrewsbury to around Portsmouth), the Corby area, some of Lancashire (north and west of the centre of Manchester), some parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and in the areas that border Scotland. The prestige form, however, exerts a steady pressure toward non-rhoticity. Thus the urban speech of Bristol or Southampton is more accurately described as variably rhotic, the degree of rhoticity being reduced as one moves up the class and formality scales.