folk awareness of dialect variation

[Nathan H Brown]

Bostonians use three major things as shibboleths: Boston Common, Public
Garden, and Copely Square. Boston Common and Public Garden are always in
the singular, never in the plural. And it's pronounced /k)pli/ Square;
non-natives often mispronounce it /koUpli/. "Worcester" is another place
name people use as a shibboleth; most people in Eastern Massachusetts
know to say it /w3st@/ (3= the vowel in "learn" and "bird" and "work").
"Gloucester" is /glast@/ or /gl)st@/, "Amherst" is /am at st/, "Leicester"
is /lEst@/ and "Leominster" is /lEmInst@/. These are only a few examples;
Massachusetts crawls with hard-to-pronounce place names, many of them
also the names of similarly-pronounced towns in England, that the locals
use as shibboleths. If you want to know some more such pronunciations, go
to the website "How to Pronounce Worcester Mass and Other Massachusetts
Names, or http://www.worcestermass.com/pronounce.shtml

Also, I've noticed that on websites by actual Bostonians, they
phonetically spell the name of their city "Bawstin," which indicates that
they pronounce it either /b)st at n/ or /bu at st@n/. Every Bostonian I've ever
talked to has used one of those two pronunciations. Everyone in Upstate
New York thinks that Bostonians say /bast at n/, but I've never heard this
from an actual Bostonian.