Waltham, Massachusetts
The Waltham Accent
Waltham sits inside the Boston dialect area, which covers Boston and eastern New England, United States. The nearest other area is New York City, about 231km away.
Take the quiz and see how close your accent is →
What people in Waltham sound like
- Non-rhotic — “park the car” as “pahk the cah”.
- Intrusive R between vowels: “the idear of it”.
- A broad, fronted vowel in “park”, “aunt” and “half”.
- Local vocabulary: “bubbler” for a drinking fountain, “wicked” as an intensifier.
These are the markers of the Boston accent as a whole. No survey claims every speaker in Waltham has all of them — the full Boston profile sets out where the region varies.
Waltham against New York City
Waltham is close enough to the New York City area that the two get confused. These are the questions where the survey expects a different answer on each side.
| Question | Waltham | New York City |
|---|---|---|
| When you say “car” by itself, do you pronounce an R sound at the end? | “car” ends in a vowel, with no R sound | the R at the end of “car” is pronounced |
Dialect areas near Waltham
Is your accent from Waltham?
There is no way to answer that from a description. The test asks 29 questions about the words you use and how you say them, scores your answers against the Boston / Eastern New England English profile and every other profile in the survey, and shows you where people who answer the way you do actually live.