The Maine accent is the local traditional dialect of Eastern New England English native to parts of Maine, especially along the "Down East" and "Mid Coast" seaside regions. It is characterized by a variety of features, particularly among older speakers, including r-dropping, resistance to the horse–hoarse merger, a deletion or "breaking" of certain syllables, and some unique vocabulary. This traditional Maine accent is rapidly declining; a 2013 study of Portland speakers found the horse–hoarse merger to be currently embraced by all ages and the cot–caught merger to be resisted, despite being typical among other Eastern New England speakers, even reported in the 1990s in Portland itself. In the northern region of Maine along the Quebec border, Franco-Americans may show French-language influences in their English.
Phonology
Maine English often features phonetic change or phonological change of certain characteristics. One such characteristic is that, like in all traditional Eastern New England English, Maine English pronounces the "r" sound only when it comes before a vowel, but not before a consonant or in any final position. For example, "car" may sound to listeners like "cah" and "Mainer" like "Mainah." Also, as in much New England English, the final "-ing" ending in multi-syllable words sounds more like "-in," for example, in stopping and starting. The Maine accent follows the pronunciation of Eastern New England English, with the following additional features:
The tense vowels tend to be somewhat longer than the lax ones, but they differ more in quality than length. and can be diphthongized to. Neither length nor the diphthongal varieties of and are taken into account in transcriptions found in this article.
may be a pure vowel without r-coloring as in RP:, though it can also be fronted to. This makes vowel length marginally phonemic, as in the near-minimal pair foreword vs. forward. In rhotic AmE, the unstressed syllables in these two words are not distinguished. When is fronted to, it forms a long-short pair with, as in the minimal pairbird vs. bed. Vowel pairs not involving differ more in quality than length. In the word-final positions, / can also differ in quality from by being more open, so that the final vowels in cypher and alpha are often lower . In the rest of the article, the length mark is omitted, the vowel is transcribed with and the schwa is transcribed with regardless of its phonetic height. This is to be understood as a distinction between stressable tense and unstressable lax schwas, rather than a consistent difference in quality.
, and are not separate phonemes but rather disyllabic sequences, same as,, + : here, there and more, in all cases with a possible glide after the stressed vowel:.
, and are merged to , so that horse is pronounced, rhyming with loss.
Many speakers also produce a dipping tone when they pronounce the extended word; they lower their tone for the first syllable and raise it for the second syllable. The phrase "You can't get there from here," coined in an episode of the mid-1900s humor stories collection Bert & I, is a quintessential example of the principle of syllable extension.
Lexicon
The traditional Maine dialect has a fairly rich vocabulary. Some of this vocabulary is shared with other New England dialects, however much of it is specific to Maine. This vocabulary includes, but is not limited to, the following terms:
apiece — an undetermined distance
ayuh — yes; okay; sure; that's right
beetah — a motor vehicle with value so diminished by extensive road salt corrosion there is little concern about additional collision damage from driving on icy roads
corner — the neighborhood surrounding an intersection of rural roads
culch — trash or rubbish
cunning — cute
cutter — an active child or younger person
dinner pail — lunch box
dite — a tiny amount
door yard — the yard or occupant's space outside a dwelling's exterior door—sometimes decorated with ornamental plants, and often used for temporary storage of tools, toys, sleds, carts, or bicycles
Down East — loosely refers to the coastal regions of Hancock and Washington counties; because that boats traveled downwind from Boston to Maine - also used in Canadian English, possibly as the aforementioned Maine counties are close to parts of Atlantic Canada.
dressing — application of manure to a garden
dry-ki — an accumulation of floating dead wood on the downwind shore of a lake
fart — an inflexibly meticulous individual
flatlander — visitor from elsewhere, often from Massachusetts due to its flat topography
Maine humorist Marshall Dodge based much of his humor from the Maine dialect, beginning first with his involvement with the series Bert & I, a "Down East" collection of humor stories created during the 1950s and 1960s.
Well-known author, musician, and former television broadcaster Tim Sample is known nationally for his use of Maine vernacular.
Jud Crandall, main character in Stephen King's 1983 novel Pet Sematary is written to have a thick 'Down East' accent, his pronunciations often spelled phonetically throughout the novel.
