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How much longer will its music linger?
From call-in radio shows to corner bars, the accent that defined Boston is losing ground. A Dartmouth linguist has research to prove it.
To even ask the question feels borderline blasphemous. But is the Boston accent — a dialect that has minted mayors, sabotaged movies, and fueled a robust industry of gift-store mugs — dying?
Has the last person to bark out pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd already been born?
In December, Katherine Loftus, a proud daughter of Southie — and now a lawyer living in Milton — took to Instagram to sound the alarm.
“My kids don’t have a Boston accent and it literally kills me,” Loftus, 41, began in an intimate video, as she cradled a mug of coffee, her hair, makeup, and nails decidedly done, her r’s decidedly missing. “They’ll make fun of me. They’ll be like, ‘Can we go to the paaahk?’
“It’s gone. It’s gone,” she continued, mourning gentrification and other forces that sparked a diaspora so intense her own children are growing up in the suburbs, surrounded by friends, teachers, and others who, in her words, “talk regulah.”
Regulah.
It’s a howl that resonates — from Southie’s L Street Tavern, where “newbies” amble over from their fancy apartments and pay with credit cards (not cash, like the old-timers do); to the call lines of WROR, where host Bob Bronson says Gen Y’ers don’t even sound like they’re from here, or anywhere in particular; to Dartmouth College, where a sociolinguist who did a quantitative analysis found that the lifespan of the dialect may be measured in . . . well, we’ll get to that in a moment.
It’s not enough that we’re losing our snowy winters, that our liberal arts colleges are in crisis, that Dennis Lehane himself said nothing ever happens here anymore.
Now they’re coming for our vowels too.
“The core demographic for the Boston accent is sports radio,” said 98.5 The Sports Hub’s Mike Felger, “and we hear less of it, and it’s too bad.”
Felger, a Milwaukee native, took a moment to extol the accent’s beauty — its “inherent sarcasm,” its implied “screw you,” its intense, in-a-rush delivery.
“It’s a romance language,” he swooned.
The accent is fading from Marjorie Whittaker’s accent-modification classes, too. Twenty-five years ago, a substantial percentage of the students who came to the Whittaker Group were there to lose their Boston accents, but now, most of her clients are foreign professionals, eager to perfect their pronunciation for business purposes.
She offered a story. She called an insurance provider recently, and the outgoing recorded message instructed callers which “numbah” to push for various questions. “I haven’t heard that in a while,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Is the Boston accent dying? Has the last person to bark out "pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd" already been born?
Give us a ring at (617) 798-0874 and tell us (all accents welcome).
What’s going on is as local as the “amenitized” buildings rising where triple-deckers once ruled. It’s as cyber as the TikTok influencers raising a generation of Bostonians. And as global as the students and families moving here for school or other opportunities.
In 2000, Boston became a majority-minority city. In 2021, the foreign-born population reached 29 percent, up 16 points from 1960. In 2025, Frank Baker, a losing candidate for an at-large seat on the City Council, told supporters gathered at Dorchester’s Florian Hall on election night, “I wear two things proudly. I wear my father’s union pin right here . . . and I wear my Boston accent with pride.”
Of course it was never the case that everyone in Boston spoke with a Boston accent, even if "Saturday Night Live" and late night spoofs made it seem like the whole city was nothing but a bunch of white, chain-smoking townies.
Perhaps the accent’s bio — or maybe its prewritten obit — is best seen in mayoral terms. When Marty Walsh was elected, in 2013, so pronounced was his accent that the Globe wrote a story that examined not only his accent, but those of his predecessors going back to Kevin White in the 1960s.
“In Walsh, students of Bostonese have found their avatah,” the headline read. Less than a decade later, in 2021, the Globe captured a very different story. “Michelle Wu wins historic Boston mayor’s race, marking a new era for the city.”
“When I was growing up, all the teachers had Boston accents,” said Angela Peri, the 60-something founder and co-owner of Boston Casting.
She still speaks with a Boston accent, she explained, needlessly, but her own son, Rocco, 25, doesn’t.
“Rocco!” she called out, “do you have a Boston accent?”
Rocco came to the phone. “It’s very light,” he said in the voice of a normal person.
The regional dialect — like others across the country — is disappearing by attrition as native speakers die off. And it’s also, in local parlance, being “beaten out” of people (but it sometimes roars back after a few beers, or a rush hour drive on the Expressway).
Jim Murray, 49, a co-host on 98.5 The Sports Hub, and a local who worked actively to lose his accent, followed a familiar arc. In college, he signed up for a voice and articulation class. “I didn’t want to sound like local trash,” he said, recalling his motivation. “But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve appreciated being from here.”
The accent can be a source of shame, it’s true, but also of pride, and of something even better: social media fame.
@kaceylevesque Say the word on the beat, Boston edition 😭
♬ original sound - Kacey Levesque
Romano Duncan, 25, a Revere native who held onto his accent despite moving to Andover at the age of 4, recently went viral after his girlfriend secretly filmed and uploaded a video of him playing the popular “Say the Word on Beat” challenge.
Millions of people on TikTok and Instagram have watched him enthusiastically calling out the pictures being shown on the TV screen — “bear,” “chair,” “hair” and “pear” — in thick Bostonese.
“This should be Boston’s new ambulance siren,” wrote one person.
Reached by phone, with his girlfriend and unofficial agent, Kacey Levesque, by his side, Duncan said he was surprised when she told him that he was blowing up on social media. “I didn’t understand why it was so funny,” he said.
But as the accent fades from Boston’s soundscape, its remaining practitioners often bring joy.
“You’ve got to talk to my friend Derek!” Murray, the sports radio host, said.
Derek Witham, 55, reached later by phone, explained that growing up in Malden, in low-income housing, he was surrounded by so many people who spoke like him that he didn’t know he had an accent.
But he began to suspect something was up on a trip to Southern California 20 years ago, when he was shooting the breeze with a P.F. Chang’s bartender as he waited for his takeout, and felt another customer staring at him.
“Can I help you?” he demanded.
“Are you out here to read?” she asked, figuring him for a method actor.
“Read???” Witham shot back. “What do you mean? This is how I speak.”
“People pay a lot to learn how to sound like you,” she said.
But for how much longer? Have we hit late-stage wicked?
Let’s go back to the Dartmouth linguistics professor, James Stanford.
In 2010, he launched a 10-year quantitative study in which he and students recorded and analyzed the speech patterns of 993 New Englanders — with 80 face-to-face interviews done in Southie alone.
People, brace yourselves: “What we found,” he said, “is that many of the features that are considered the ‘traditional’ Boston accent are fading, in younger generations especially.”
Particularly at risk of disappearing: “Non-rhotic speech” — aka the famed “r” dropping.
“We find that the following factors are statistically significant predictors of non-rhotic speech in the Boston area,” he wrote in a follow-up email: “older age, lower socioeconomic status, and ethnicity (i.e. non-rhotic speech is more common in white speakers).”
When a reporter pressed him for a dead-by date, he demurred, explaining that it’s “complex.” Even if the non-rhotic speech goes silent, he said, a more subtle version of the accent — the way we pronounce our vowels — could persist.
He was pressed again, and finally allowed it could be over in a matter of decades.
Decades? Perhaps it’s time to accept a hard truth: Some day, and kinda soon, we’ll look back with nostalgia at the days when we had bad Boston accents in movies to complain about.
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.
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