NH is generally the outlier - they have the lightest New England accent according to this New Englander - check out my above post.
Maine is distinct in it’s own right, heck people from northern Maine - Bangor and above - don’t even consider people living south of Wells Beach to even be from Maine; instead they are from “Over there”.
IMO, there aren’t “state” accents for any of these states. Regions of the states emphasize different parts of the entire New England accent. Northern VT, NH, and ME sound more alike to each other than they do to the southern reaches of any of those states.
My wife and I are both natives of Boston’s North Shore, my wife from Salem and me from Revere. My wife’s accent isn’t too thick, and doesn’t change much. Mine is pretty undetectable when I want it to be, but when I’m drunk, stressed or tired, the Full Fu*kin’ Reveah Guinea Accent comes out.
A quick story… My wife and I were in Island Falls, Maine, which is Up There, about 100 miles north of Bangor. We had stopped for breakfast at a diner, and my back was to the booth behind me, in which were a bunch of guys with the full-on Down East accent, ayuhs and all. I figured they were a bunch of geezers, a sort of living cultural preserve. I was looking forward to seeing these old codgers when I got up from the booth, but was stunned to see that they were about my age (late 20s at the time).
It’s funny how I mentally filed that accent away as associated with a dying breed, but I got corrected on that idea.
As to the source of the “New England accent”…
As several people have remarked, there are many distinct accents, even just in southern New England. Aside from the blueblood “Yankee” clenched jaw variety that exists in several horsey enclaves and Beacon Hill which is probably the oldest dialect, it’s seems to me to be largely regional and colored by ethnicity. You have the ethnic Irish (South Shore), the ethnic Italian (North Shore) and ethnic Portuguese (Southeast Mass/Rhode Island), which is more New Yorkish. In central and western New England, there are also ethnic Polish enclaves. As you go north, you find more French influences. There are subtle variations within all of these these general groups, too.
This might help you…
Not so good English actors, when on radio plays (BBC radio 4 I’m looking at YOU!), when required to play Americans;use the Bostonian accent.
Because it is so similar to the English accent.
Thats where Pahk the car comes from.
From Massachusetts yes, but the rest depend on what parts of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire you mean. People from the north country in NH sound more like deep mainers and vermonters from the northern kingdom than they do those of us in the southern half of the state.
The_Raven, I find it interesting that you said your accent comes out when you’re tired. I occasionally baffle people from away because I don’t have a stereotypical northeastern accent like they expect…except when I’m sleepy.
I don’t listen to radio plays on Radio 4 much, but I do consume a fair amount of British programming from elsewhere. The bad American accents I hear from the Brits are usually (1) a New York “wise guy” accent, (2) a flat nasal accent that’s supposed to be Midwestern, or just generic American perhaps, and (3) a Southern accent only slightly less comical than Foghorn Leghorn.
Now that I think of it, I bet many British actors get their American accents from Warner Brothers cartoons.
So far, no one has taken a swing at the OP’s actual question (except in #37 above). Look at the earliest settlers:
Plymouth Colony:
Priscilla Alden, who gave birth to and raised ten Massachusetts babies, was from Surrey (to the south of London).
William Brewster was from Lincolnshire (East Midlands).
William Bradford was from Yorkshire (northeast England).
John Carver was from Nottinghamshire (also East Midlands).
They’re from all over the place. Hard to generalize there.
Massachusetts Bay Colony:
John Winthrop was from Suffolk (East Anglia).
Margaret Winthrop, who bore two Massachusetts babies, was from from northern Essex (east of London), near the border with East Anglia.
Thomas Dudley was from Northamptonshire (again East Midlands).
The earliest settlers named Suffolk and Norfolk counties in Massachusetts after parts of East Anglia. The original Boston is in Suffolk, and so is the New World one.
More on the MBC:
“Most of the colony’s settlers that arrived in the first 12 years came from two regions of England. Many of the colonists came from the counties of Lincolnshire and East Anglia, northeast of London, and a large group also came from Devon, Somerset, and Dorset in the southwest of England. Although these areas provided the bulk of the migration, colonists also came other regions of England.” Cite for this: Hart, Albert Bushnell (ed) (1927). Commonwealth History of Massachusetts, p. 56-57.
I grew up in Wisconsin, spent my whole young life there, went to college at Madison, then took a job in Silicon Valley. I remember going back to Wisconsin after being in California for a number of years (my direct family had moved elsewhere in the meantime) and I met the younger brothers of a friend from high school for the first time in a few years. They were both high-school dropouts (or just barely scraped through), working factory jobs on and off as the economy allowed and hadn’t ever been too far from the hometown. And, oh my God, they were the first proof that there really is a “Wisconsin accent”. Kinda “Fargo-ey”, but less so. Back when I knew them in high school/college days I never found them to have any accent at all, but after being away for a few years, it was like one especially was just a few steps away from being Mr. Mohra (“That don’t sound like too good a deal for him, then.”) from Fargo.
The funny thing is that they surely didn’t pick it up from his dad, who grew up on Long Island and still sounds like a Long Islander. The mom is a native Wisconsinite, but not especially “accenty”, with parents of Norwegian decent…I figured they picked it up from her side of the family and mostly their peers I suppose.
Further facts… so the OP won’t get too lonely waiting for discussion of the actual question they asked…
“Many early settlers of New England came from the Puritan south and east of England. The influx into the American South, however, hailed in much larger ratios from Scotland, Ireland, and the upcountry north and west of England.
…
The heartland of the Puritan side in the English Civil War had been the Eastern Association—the military confederation of East Anglia (Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk) with the adjoining shires of Hertford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Lincoln. Six generations later, the powder keg of the American Revolution was also located in counties called Essex and Suffolk (Massachusetts Bay), as well as in places like Boston, Norwich, Chelmsford, Billerica, Dedham, and Braintree, named by Massachusetts and Connecticut settlers for East Anglian hometowns.”
—Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ War, p. xviii-xix
So the Boston accent of today sounds like that accent?
How extensive, geographically, is East Anglia? I ask, because you can find New England cities named for virtually every city on the southern coast of England - from Falmouth all the way to Dover.