Wicked Different: How Babson Students Experience the Boston Accent
The first time Yash Shah ’30 heard a strong Boston accent in person, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
The first-year Babson College student, who grew up in Westchester, New York, was in line at a Starbucks across from Boston Common when a customer in front of him began to order.
“It was funny, because it sounded rude, but I could tell the person was being nice,” Shah recalled. “I was like, huh?”
Having grown up watching movies such as Good Will Hunting, Shah had come to associate the Boston accent with a certain rough-around-the-edges, impatient attitude. But his encounters with actual Bostonians revealed something different.
“If you leave them alone, they will leave you alone. But the second you initiate any sort of conversation, you can bond over anything,” he said. “It’s very easy.”
From Fenway Park to the Freedom Trail, out-of-state students such as Shah will likely encounter plenty of Greater Boston’s tastes, traditions, and treasures during their time at Babson College. That includes the famous—and infamously imitated—Boston accent.
Lately, that accent has been getting national attention thanks to Massport’s Voice of Logan competition, which attracted nearly 6,000 applicants hoping to become the new voice of Logan International Airport. Officials recently narrowed the field to eight finalists, who auditioned with a script encouraging visitors to enjoy, “a lobstah roll by the hahbah,” before “paying your respects to the Green Monstah.” The winner will be announced November 5.
From Hollywood to the ‘Hahbah’
Most Babson students interviewed said they are far more likely to hear the accent on Newbury Street than on Babson’s campus.
“It’s a very diverse community at Babson,” Aadit Nigam ’29 said. The second-year student from Noida, India, heard the accent in movies and TV before attending Babson. Out walking in Boston, he found it “a little bit hard to interpret” but also “a pretty fun experience.”
“It was funny, because it sounded rude, but I could tell the person was being nice.”
Yash Shah ’30
Alex Ho ’28, from New York City, said he has heard classic expressions such as “wicked smaht,” but rarely encounters the accent on campus. One exception? His Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship professor, Robert McCullough MBA’81, who occasionally leans into his Boston roots while teaching.
McCullough, an assistant professor of practice in entrepreneurship, has a favorite story about his barely-there accent that he tells students when introducing himself. The Quincy native attended Suffolk University, where most classmates grew up a T ride away and R’s were an endangered species.
When McCullough arrived at Babson for his graduate degree, his fellow classmates were from across the country and the world. He worried his dropped R’s made him sound less professional.
“I made a huge effort for about two weeks to overpronounce my R’s. You know, ‘Park the car,’” McCullough said. “After that, I did it naturally.”
But the old accent didn’t disappear entirely. ““After a couple of drinks, you’ll find me pahking the cah again,”” McCullough joked.
An Accent Worth Keeping
Shannon Mooney, an assistant teaching professor of English at Babson, studies the New Jersey accent and believes regional accents carry cultural significance beyond their distinctive sounds.
“I think they can be really fascinating and kind of wonderful elements of a person’s identity and their personality,” Mooney said
Historically, Mooney said, regional accents haven’t always been celebrated. Growing up in New Jersey, people would associate a strong accent with a lack of education or professionalism. That’s what makes the Voice of Logan competition so intriguing, she said.
“I like that this competition seems to be potentially recentering or reprioritizing that regional aspect of Boston’s identity,” Mooney said.
For Maria del Toro DBA’29, a student in Babson’s Doctor of Business Administration program, the Boston accent has become so familiar that she doesn’t even have to hear someone speaking to experience it.
Growing up in the Bronx, del Toro wasn’t a fan of Boston. She encountered the accent while visiting her sister, who attended Pine Manor College more than a decade ago.
“I would come here to visit my sister, and I would wear my Yankees cap, and somebody would inevitably heckle me and be like, ‘Yankees suck,’” she recalled.
And while del Toro still doesn’t particularly like the accent, she’s become accustomed to hearing the dropped R’s and even hears it in her head while reading certain words. That day, for example, a sign outside Babson Commons announced Trim Dining Hall’s eighth annual lobster mania.
“I heard it when I read the sign. I heard ““lobstah,” del Toro said while laughing. “Maybe I’ve been here too long.”
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