New England English
Eastern New England English encompasses Boston and Maine accents, and, according to some sources, the distinct Rhode Island accent. All Eastern New England English is famous for non-rhoticity, meaning it drops the "r" sound everywhere except before a vowel: thus, in words like "car", "card", "fear", and "chowder" (). The phrase "Park the car in Harvard Yard"—dialectally transcribed —is commonly used as a shibboleth, or speech indicator, for the non-rhotic Eastern New England dialect running from Boston north to Maine, and as far west as Worcester, which contrasts with the generally rhotic dialects elsewhere in North America. In all of Eastern New England, except Rhode Island, words like "caught" and "cot" are pronounced identically (both are often rounded, thus: ), because those two vowel sounds have fully merged. A phenomenon called Canadian raising occurs throughout Eastern New England, causing "writer" to have a different stressed vowel sound than "rider", and for the verb "house" to have a different vowel sound than the noun "house". and have relatively back starting positions. The "horse"–"hoarse" distinction is still present to some extent in some areas, as well as the "Mary"–"marry"–"merry" distinction in many speakers.
Norfolk dialect
The Norfolk accent sounds very different from that of London and the Home Counties. The main characteristics of the accent are set out below, usually with reference to the standard English accent known as Received Pronunciation (RP). Phonetic symbols (in square brackets) and phonemic symbols (in slant brackets) are used where they are needed to avoid ambiguity (brackets in IPA). Five characteristics are particularly important:
The study of intonation remains undeveloped in linguistics. Writing in 1889, the phonetician Alexander John Ellis began his section on East Anglian speech with these comments: