Massachusetts Culture & Language

Massachusetts is shaped by its universities more than any other American state. Harvard, founded in 1636, and MIT sit within a mile of each other across the river from Boston, and the student population changes the character of the city every September.

Sport is followed with an intensity that is genuinely part of the culture rather than a cliché. Fenway Park, opened in 1912, is the oldest in Major League Baseball and still the team's home. The Boston Marathon runs on Patriots' Day, a state holiday commemorating 1775 that exists almost nowhere else.

The accent is real and regional rather than uniform, strongest in the older neighbourhoods and the South Shore.

Basketball and volleyball were both invented here in the 1890s, in two western mill towns four years apart.

English, with one of the most recognisable regional accents in the country — non-rhotic, strongest in older speakers and in the South Shore, and far from universal.

Portuguese is widely spoken around New Bedford and Fall River, and Spanish across the mill cities. Boston's student population makes almost any language audible somewhere.

Local usage: the subway is the T, a milkshake with ice cream is a frappe, a drinking fountain is a bubbler in some areas, and wicked is an intensifier rather than a judgement.