Jason: Coming from southern New England, the accent where I'm from lies midway between a New York accent and a Boston accent. We speak quickly, run our words together, and drop most of our r's when they immediately follow a vowel. So a sentence like "What are you looking at?" comes off sounding like "Whudahyoulookinat?". The Boston and northern New England (swamp yankee) accents are quite a bit different sounding to me.
When I lived in the UK (Suffolk), I was told by some of my Brit friends that I was easier to understand with my accent than many other Americans were. This is called "non-rhotic accent" and it is more common in British English than in American:
We will use the term accent for varieties of a language distinguished by pronunciation, opposing it to dialect,which applies to varieties distinguished by grammaror vocabulary. The most important accent distinction in English concerns the sound we represent as /r/.Most speakers in the BrE family of dialects have a non-rhotic accent: here /r/ occurs in pre-vocalic position, i.e. when immediately preceding a vowel, as in run or area, but not in post-vocalic position, after the vowel of a syllable. For example, in a non-rhotic accent there is no /r/ in any of the words in [1] (as pronounced in isolation):
The words in [i] all end in a vowel sound, while those in [ii] end in a vowel followed by just one consonant sound; note that the letter e at the end of the words in [ib] and of torque in [iia], and also that before the d in [iib] are ‘silent’ – i.e. there is no vowel in this position in the spoken form. In many of the non-rhotic accents such pairs of words as mar and ma, floor and flaw, or torque and talk are pronounced the same. A non-rhotic accent is thus one which lacks post-vocalic /r/.
Most speakers in the AmE family of dialects, by contrast, have a rhotic accent, where there is no such restriction on the distribution of /r/: all the words in [1] are pronounced with an /r/ sound after the (final) vowel, or (in the case of stir and term) with a rhotacised (‘r -coloured’
vowel sound, a coalescence of /r/ with the vowel.
The English spelling systemreflects the pronunciation of rhotic accents: in non-rhotic
accents post-vocalic /r/ has been lost as a result of a historical change that took place after the writing system became standardised.
"The Cambridge Grammar of The English Language", Chapter 1, pp. 13-14.
[ July 28, 2004: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]