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:
North American English regional phonology
The local and historical dialect of the coastal portions of New England, sometimes called Eastern New England English, now only encompasses Northeastern New England: Maine, New Hampshire (some of whose urban speakers are retreating from this local accent), and eastern Massachusetts (including Greater Boston). The accents spoken here share the Canadian raising of as well as often , but they also possess the cot-caught merger, which is not associated with rest of "the North". Most famously, Northern New England accents (with the exception of Northwestern New England, much of southern New Hampshire, and Martha's Vineyard) are often non-rhotic. Some Northeastern New England accents are unique in North America for having resisted what is known as father–bother merger: in other words, the stressed vowel phonemes of "father" and "bother" remain distinct as and , so that the two words do not rhyme as they do in most American accents. Many Eastern New England speakers also once had a class of words with "broad "a""—that is, as in "father" in words that in most accents contain , such as "bath", "half", and "can't", similar to their pronunciation in London and southern England. The distinction between the vowels of "horse" and "hoarse" is maintained in traditional non-rhotic New England accents as for "horse" (with the same vowel as "cot" and "caught") vs. for hoarse, though the horse–hoarse merger is certainly on the rise in the region today. The phoneme has highly distinct allophones before nasal consonants. fronting is usual.