Bad Maine Accents

I’ve always been interested in language and how differently folks from different parts of our big country use the English language. As a writer, I try not to use too much local language in my Maine stories, because I find it bogs down the story. Not everyone who reads my work is a Maineiac after all. Therefore, using ah for words ending in er, i.e., suppah instead of supper, would get rather cumbersome.

I have never tried to mask my Maine accent for the 30 plus years I’ve lived here in Georgia. Usually people think I’m from Boston. That’s how much they know, right. I have however, picked up some Southern phrases along the way, like “mash the window” which means, “open the window.” The article below, which  I borrowed from the internet, will explain further.

Never is our Downeast accent murdered more than it is by Hollywood. The proof is below also.

This article comes from tvtrope.org. A trope is described as a figure of speech that is used in a figurative way, usually for rhetorical effect. Similarly, idioms are a natural way of using language that comes naturally to its native speakers, i.e. “wicked good” or ayuh.

Hollywood New England

Ah, New England: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Cradle of The American Revolution, home of Plymouth Rock, Ben and Jerry's, Walden Pond and the Red Sox, and chock full of fish.

In media, by contrast, New England gets Flanderized into...well, there's kind of a duality here.

On one side, we have the highbrow intellectuals who go to Ivy League universities, write books, dabble in philosophy and end up as magnificent eccentrics. Many of these are scions of the "Codfish Aristocracy," uber-exclusive old families who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower passenger list (none of whom were named Kennedy, incidentally; that family is famously Irish Catholic and made their money in Prohibition-era bootlegging). All this snootiness comes in very handy when a producer requires a Black Sheep... or just wants an excuse to film in and around Kennebunkport, Hyannisport, or Martha's Vineyard.

On the other side of the coin, we have the tough immigrant laborers, folksy down-home farmers, and of course the crusty flannel-wearing fishermen who give us the seafood we so crave. All of these people will be veritable founts of down-to-earth wisdom, generally dispensed using as many goofily inscrutable metaphors as possible ("Cold enough to freeze the skin off a beanpole!")

Come to think of it, fish is brain food, so maybe it all fits together after all...

In reality, New England is one of the oldest regions of the United States: six separate states with a mountain range up the middle and the Gulf Stream just offshore, meaning the climate and geography are all a lot more variable than that found in most other regions of the country. (If you don't like it, just wait five minutes.) Seacoast Massachusetts is a very different place from the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, the "Northern Plantations" of Maine or the Green Mountains of Vermont, and each region has its own variations of culture, accent and traditions. A fact which is pretty much lost on Hollywood.

The standard protocol is for the lowly, regardless of region, to be given a generic Down East accent. The grand get the Boston-specific version, as quoted above and otherwise heavily popularized by JFK and family. The irony here is that no other person in New England actually speaks like the Kennedys. Their infamous accent actually has a touch of the Queen's English mixed in, because the founding generation spent a fair amount of time in the UK while growing up (family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was Ambassador to the Court of St. James's 1938-1940 and had other business there as well).

Their ubiquitousness on the cultural scene, meanwhile, has resulted in 95% of Hollywood having no idea how to use a Boston accent, thus bolstering the careers of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and brothers Mark and Donnie Wahlberg. For that matter, non-New Englanders generally don't realize that there are in fact four versions of the "Boston" accent, only one of which is the stereotypical version — and in real life, it's hardly as exaggerated as depicted.

This trope mostly covers Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and eastern Massachusetts (Boston, Plymouth, Cape Cod, and the islands). When Connecticut appears, it tends to be depicted as a bunch of rich suburbs of New York City filled with insufferable geniuses who are/were educated at posh universities like Yale. Western Massachusetts ("west'a Woostah"), for all intents and purposes, does not exist (if you ask a lot of people from West Mass, Boston in particular, this is truth in television). As anyone from Boston will tell you, it's a wicked good city. In addition, there's a new competitor in the cliché-stakes: "Southie", home of the Southies, which (as depicted in media) is not so much South Boston as it is a crime-ridden, extremely northerly borough of New York. Whaya they tawk funny.

Rural Hollywood New England is where you usually find picturesque snowy winter landscapes. Keep in mind, of course, that this is also Lovecraft Country.

Will always find a way to say "Pahk my cah in Hahvad Yahd". Ask a New Englander to say it, and they'll send you to the hospital. ESPECIALLY if they're a Southie. AND the car'll get towed.

Contrast Like Gag Me With A Spoon! Note that some Cali/Valley speak, like, migrated over to the northeast, found it wicked awesome, and stayed.

Here are a few examples of how Hollywood treats our Downeast accent. This information also comes from tvtropes.

From Jaws:

Ellen: "In Amity you say yahd."
Martin: "They're out in the yahd, not too fah from the cah. How was that?"
Ellen: "Like you're from New York."

Roy Scheider makes a rookie mistake in saying "yadd" instead of "yahd." I'm not sure if that's "like you're from New York," but it definitely isn't like you're down the Cape. Of course, since Martin isn't actually from the Cape...

If memory serves then the location of Amity is never actually specified in any of the films themselves, although the first film (and maybe the sequels too?) was filmed at Martha's Vineyard.

M.A.S.H

The character, Hawkeye Pierce is supposedly from Crabapple Cove, Maine. But wisely neither Donald Sutherland in the movie, nor Alan Alda in the TV series, attempted to used a Maine accent.

Murder, She Wrote

set in small-town Maine. Featuring William Windom, Tom Bosley and a slew of random extras using phony Down East accents thick enough that they may qualify as the network-TV version of Dick van Dyke doing Cockney in Mary Poppins. Bosley's attempts were particularly egregious.

My comments:

Angela Lansbury supposedly was not actually from Maine, but merely lived there most of the time, so she got away with not trying to do a Downeast accent. I think Tom’s efforts were the worst I’ve ever heard on TV.

By the way, this series was actually filmed in California. Don’t you think they could have found at least one Maineiac in California to consult with or flown in one of our fishermen for a while?

My favorite TV game star who comes from Maine is Brett Summers. She was one of the panelists on the long-running Match Game. Every once in a while, especially when she used the idiom, or maybe trope, “good gravy, Marie,” her Maine accent would shine through and bring a smile to my face. I miss her.

Truth be told, and I’m sure Brett would agree if she were still with us, unless you’re a native of Coastal Maine, there’s no way you’re going to be able to fake it. Many have tried and many have failed as you’ve seen here.

Finally, God bless our Maine comedian, Bob Marley, for attempting to explain Maine accents and idioms to his audiences. I recently heard him explaining the phrase, “I’m telling you,” on Sirius radio.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this analysis. I for one will continue to explain to people that our accent is the truest to the mother country, namely, England, because we were isolated so long up here in the Northeast corner of the nation. We therefore kept truer to the mother tongue. Agree?

Thanks for listening.


Note: If you miss our Brett as much as I do, see a video of Match Game with Brett on my FB page or South End Stories page. Just click that link on the right. Enjoy.