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.
Dialect levelling in Britain
Historical examples show that dialect levelling generally takes place anywhere and anytime in situations of extensive mobility and cultural and linguistic mixing. One historical example of dialect levelling is the change in the London dialect that took place in the fifteenth century when Northern county immigrants moved to London. Their dialect diffused into southern forms and some elements were incorporated into standard English (Milroy, 2002). Dialect levelling has become a widespread phenomenon in Britain. Southern features seem to be spreading throughout the whole country and typical vowel sounds seem to be centred on big cities like Glasgow, Manchester, or Newcastle (Kerswill, 2001).