Homogenized

ber-LIN or BER-lin?

Regional accents are becoming a thing of the past!

The Boston accent is disappearing. 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.

Boston Globe

Beth Teitell

January 16, 2026

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.”

We are becoming homogenized!

It is happening all around the country. As we move from region to region, we blend our dialects. I can see it right here in my hometown, and "foreigners" (i.e., those who were not raised here) are now speaking a blend of accents.

Just watching the local news, I hear the news anchors butcher the town names… but what do you expect when they come from the four corners of the country and none of them are local? My teachers were all local; now they come from all over the state.

We are blending regional cultures as we move around the country.

Also, the post office erased all of the villages in the state. How did they do that? With ZIP codes! ZIP codes were never laid out according to local towns and villages. We think of Winsted as a town, but it is not—it is a village in the town of Winchester! Municipalities are vanishing: Winchester is no more, Kensington is no more, and “I pahked my cah in the yahd.” is going the way of the Dodo bird.