2 Most scholars agree. Anders Orbeck writes, “We are to look for the roots of Eastern Massachusetts speech in the eastern dialects of England” (Early New England Pronunciation as Reflected in Some Seventeenth Century Town Records of Eastern Massachusetts [thesis, Columbia, 1925, rev. ed., Ann Arbor, 1927]). M. Schele de Vere observes of the first generation in Massachusetts that “they brought not only their words which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of voice and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved, and are now spoken of as the ‘New England drawl,’ and the high metallic ring of the New England voice … is nothing but the well-known ‘Norfolk Whine.’” Americanisms; The English of the New World (New York, 1872); see also Herbert J. Tjossem, “New England Pronunciation before 1700” (thesis, Yale, 1955).
One of the best general discussions is still George Philip Krapp, The English Language in America (2 vols., New York, 1925), II, 124; see also G. H. Grandgent, “From Franklin to Lowell: A Century of New England Pronunciation,” PMLA 14 (1899), 207-39; Henry Alexander, “The Language of the Salem Witch Trials,” AS, 3 (1927-28), 390-400; C. H. Grandgent, Fashion and the Broad A in Old and New England (Cambridge, 1920).
3 Through many centuries it preserved archaic constructions such as housen for houses, and blowth for blossoms which were rarely recorded in other parts of British America, and had been commonly used in East Anglia. S. A. Green, Natural History and Topography of Groton, Massachusetts (Groton, 1912), 74; James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers, series II (Boston, 1867), introduction.