Vowels NORTH/FORCE

ENEers traditionally made a distinction between pairs like for and four, or horse and hoarse, which is not heard in most of the rest of the U.S. As a result of this distinction, combined with r-dropping, a Boston pronunciation of short rhymes with shot; north rhymes with moth. This distinction may be disappearing among young people (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.). Our NH speakers have merged these two vowels.

Laferriere (1979: 428) defines the vowel in short and forty (NORTH) as , in contrast to the standard . The words that have this vowel in standard American English are divided (apparently arbitrarily, cf. McCarthy 1999) into two classes in the Boston dialect, some of which allow this alternation and some of which use only [oə] (Laferriere 1979: 429).