Boston English

One of the best (in the sense of "most comical") regional dialects of American English, native to eastern Massachusetts. basically, any "ar"/"er" sound is replaced by "ah". In semi-technical terms, the accent is characterized by loss of the post-vocalic 'r' sound, e.g.:

car     -> cah
mother  -> moth·ah
garbage -> gah·bij

also: 'wicked' can be used as an intensifying adverb (like 'very') and a carbonated beverage is either called 'soda' or 'tonic', depending on location and the age of the speaker. Under no circumstances is it referred to as 'pop'.

A tricky accent to fake well; Robin Williams's attempt at Boston English in Good Will Hunting was laughably bad.

However, when we hit junior high school, we went to the regional high school, and there were cool kids from the neighboring town, which was a little less upscale- the "cool kids" from that town had Boston accents. And so throughout junior high school there was this phenomenon of hearing kids from my town whose names are things like Jessica Smith or Robbie Herrick, really white-bread waspy suburban kids whose families were not from Boston to begin with, who for the sake of coolness went around all day speaking with laughably poor Boston accents so that they could be accepted with the kids from the other town.

Some more quirky Boston pronunciations (a lot of which are dying out with kids of my generation):

• mine is pronounced "mayan"
• Filenes (a department store chain) is pronounced "faleans"
• potatoes is pronounced "puddaydiz"
• going is pronounced as "go win"- in fact the "g" on many words ending in "-ing" is often not pronounced
• "can't" is sometimes pronounced with a short "a" rather than with a longer "a" as in standard american english. In other words, as riptor pointed out below, some words have a pronunciation closer to British English than to American English.

I have to say that probably the current Boston accent is a mixture of the english spoken by the earlier english settlers of the area with that of later Irish immigrants(I base this on the fact that my grandmother, who is Irish, as well as a lot of the other Irish people I know, speak the most "ideal" Boston English) but this is a subject that definitely merits further study.

Unless you are a Hahvid cop.

And it's pronounced "Hahvid" in good B.E., not "Hahvahd", unless you are a Boston Brahmin, the now-rare onetime Boston intellectual elite.

For more info on Boston English see The Wicked Good Guide to Boston English: http://www.boston-online.com/glossary.html