American English from Eastern Massachusetts
The following transcriptions were made from tape recordings of the speech of two natives of Greater Boston, reading ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ followed by a sentence composed to illustrate the distinctive New England distribution of low vowels. In each transcription, [aː] varies from cardinal to []; [ɑ] is about cardinal; [ɒː] varies from cardinal to ; the [o] in ‘o#x0259;, oɹ] ranges from to . Whereas [ɒː] and [oə] are kept quite distinct, as are [aː] and [ɑ], [ɑ] and [ɒː] are close together, overlap, and are not kept rigorously separate, [a] in [aɩ, aɷ] = [] or ; the first speaker uses a more advanced and the second speaker a more retracted variety. Diphthongization of [eɩ], [oɷ] is only slight, and the first element of [oɷ] is near cardinal and well-rounded. [œ] is a lightly-rounded , about like French [ə].