New England dialect regions

The Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath 1939-43) divides the area into Eastern (ENE) and Western (WNE) (divided by the Green Mountains of VT in the north, the Berkshires in the middle, and the Connecticut River in the south), with seven subregions dictated by settlement patterns (Carver 1987). However, today there is little in the way of linguistic markers of these sub-regions, aside from some distinctive characteristics of ENE. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Kurath 1949) divides New England into only three regions (North-eastern, Southeastern, and Southwestern), better representing current linguistic differences.

As table 1 demonstrates, the English of NE is in many ways similar to that heard in many other regions of the United States. In the following section, we will discuss the ways in which NE English may be different from other regions.