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
American English is predominantly rhotic today, but at the end of the 1800s non-rhotic accents were common throughout much of the coastal Eastern and Southern U.S., including along the Gulf Coast. In fact, non-rhotic accents were established in all major U.S. cities along the Atlantic coast except for the Delaware Valley area centered around Philadelphia and Baltimore. During the early to mid-1900s (presumably correlated with the Second World War), rhotic accents began to gain social prestige even in the these traditionally non-rhotic areas. Thus, non-rhotic accents are increasingly perceived by Americans as sounding foreign or less educated, while rhotic accents are increasingly seen as sounding more "General American".