Bawlmer - Pronunciation

Pronunciation

Baltimore English closely resembles blue-collar Philadelphia-area English pronunciation in many ways. These two cities are the only major ports on the Eastern Seaboard never to have developed nonrhotic speech among European American speakers; they were greatly influenced in their early development by Hiberno-English, Scottish English, and West Country English. Due to the significant similarity between the speeches of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Delaware and southern New Jersey, some sociolinguists refer to them collectively as the Mid-Atlantic dialect.

The Bawlmerese or Ballimerese dialect that originated among the White blue-collar residents of South and Southeast Baltimore is not the only accent found in Baltimore. There is also an accent found among African American Baltimoreans. Notable characteristics include vowel centralization before /r/ (words such as "carry" are often pronounced like "curry") and the centralization of /ɑ/ to schwa, particularly in the word "dog" (often pronounced as "dug").

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