Western New England English
The English of Western New England in fact shows many sharp differences throughout rather than one uniform accent. In 2001, Charles Boberg, discussing that Western New England English was a likely direct influence on the Inland Northern English of the Great Lakes region, still identified as many as four or five English sub-regional accents within Western New England itself, based on data from the late 1990s:
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/
Words that would have a stressed before intervocalic in the UK's Received Pronunciation (RP) are treated differently in different varieties of North American English. As shown in the table below, in Canadian English, all of these are pronounced with , as in "cord" (and thus merge with historic prevocalic in words like "glory" because of the horse–hoarse merger). In the accents of Philadelphia, southern New Jersey, and the Carolinas (and traditionally throughout the South), these words are pronounced among some with , as in "card" (and thus merge with historic prevocalic in words like "starry"). In the accents of New York City, Long Island, and nearby parts of New Jersey, these words are pronounced with like in RP. However, this is met with hypercorrection of , (thus still merging with historic prevocalic in "starry"). On the other hand, the traditional Eastern New England accents (famously, the Rhode Island and Boston accents) these words are pronounced with without hypercorrection, just like in RP. Most of the rest of the United States (marked "General American" in the table), however, has a distinctive mixed system: while the majority of words are pronounced as in Canada, the four (sometimes five) words in the left-hand column are typically pronounced with ; and the East Coast regions seem to be slowly moving toward this system over time.