Interesting article about New England phonology

An interesting article about New England phonology:

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:YUaRrGNUJLoJ:www.unh.edu/linguistics/NN/papers/NagyRoberts.pdf+ENE+rhotic&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Thank you very much. It's amazing I haven't found that myself by now. I'll have to link to it at my website, which, by the way, is at http://students.csci.unt.edu/~kun

Really interesting article! Thanks!

One thing that I find very interesting about New England (and actually other parts of the country as well) is that it seems like older dialect features often remain longer in the cities than the countryside. As someone who's travelled the region a lot, it's interesting to me that while most native Bostonians still have quite strong New England accents, most of the residents of Augusta, ME whom I met while staying there had adopted fairly standard American accents.

I also wonder if the division between Eastern and Western New England isn't a bit misleading. I've always perceived non-rhoticity as somewhat more of a coastal/inland issue than Eastern/Western. For example, even though New Hampshire is an Eastern New England state, I've never once met an "r-dropper" north of Nashua. In Rhode Island (close to where I grew up), non-rhoticity is common in seaside cities and towns, but I find that the speech of rural residents of the state often sounds more like WNE.

It's a fascinating region, accent-wise. The diversity of speech is more on par with the UK than other parts of the country.