Pronunciation Of Park The Car In The Harvard Yard

Introduction
The Boston accent is a North-Eastern American English accent. It is most typically spoken by people from Boston, Massachusetts, United States, as well as in other states of the New England region. The Boston accent originated from the Boston Brahmins, an exclusive group of aristocrats. To sound high cultured they mimicked the British English dialect. A typical way of demonstrating a Boston accent is to pronounce the phrase “Park the car in the Harvard Yard” as “Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd”.

Method
The most prominent characteristic is the non-rhoticity. The phoneme /r/ does not typically occur in the coda position. Instead, schwa [ə] and other neutral vowels replace the /r/ after a high- or mid vowel. This can be found in words like weird [wiɨd] and square [ˈskweə].

For example, car is by its own pronounced as [kʰaː], but in the case of the sentence “Park the car in the Harvard Yard”, an /r/ would be placed between car and in [pʰaːk ðə ˈkʰaːɹ ɪn ˈhaːvəd ˈjaːd].
To see if we could prove the non-rhoticity and linking r, we searched for two Boston natives on dialectsarchive.com. We listened to a man born in 1940 in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester as well as a woman from the same location, born in