New York dialect

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The New York dialect of the English language is spoken by most European Americans who were raised in New York City and much of its metropolitan area including the lower Hudson Valley, Long Island, and in northeastern New Jersey. It is often considered to be one of the most recognizable accents within American English (Newman 2005).

The English spoken in northern New Jersey, although often confused with that of New York City, is (outside a few cities very close to New York) actually different from the New York City dialect. Similarly, a variety of unrelated dialects are spoken in those parts of New York State outside the metropolitan area.

Contents 1 Macrosocial extensions 1.1 Geographic factors 1.2 Ethnic and racial factors 1.3 Social class factors 1.4 Beyond New York 2 Linguistic features 2.1 Pronunciation 2.1.1 Vowels 2.1.2 Consonants 2.2 Syntax 2.3 Lexicon 3 History 4 See also 4.1 External links 4.2 References

Macrosocial extensions

Geographic factors

The New York dialect is closely confined to the geographically small but densely populated New York City Dialect Region, which consists of the city's five Boroughs, the western half of Long Island, and the cities of Newark and Jersey City in New Jersey. However, the terms “New York English” and “New York dialect” are, strictly speaking, misnomers. The classic New York dialect is centered on middle and working class European Americans, and this ethnic cluster now accounts for less than half of the city’s population, although the same "White Flight" that reduced their numbers in the city has led to expansion of the dialect in the outlying areas to which they moved. Now, the most secure strongholds of the New York dialect are arguably the suburban areas of Nassau County, western Suffolk County, Westchester County, northeastern and southwestern Queens, and Staten Island, although some strong New York dialect speakers remain in urban sections of Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and even Manhattan. It is often claimed that the dialect varies by neighborhood or borough. In particular, many 20th-century New Yorkers have claimed to perceive a difference between Brooklyn and Bronx accents, with a Brooklyn accent being "heavier". This may be true, although no published study has found any feature that varies in this way beyond local names. Impressions that the dialect changes may also be a byproduct of class and/or ethnic variation.

Ethnic and racial factors

The variations of the New York accent are a result of the layering of ethnic speech from the waves of immigrants that settled in the city, from the earliest settlement by the Dutch and English, followed in the 1800s by the Irish and Midwesterners (typically of French, German, Irish, Scandinavian, and Scottish descent). Over time these collective influences "ganged" together to give New York its distinctive accent. [1] From the turn of the century until about 1930, predominantly Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, but also later Irish and others, arrived and further affected the region's speech. Sociolinguistic research, which is ongoing, suggests some differentiation between these last groups' speech may exist, in particular Labov's (1982), finding of differences in the rate and degree of the tensing and raising of (oh) and (aeh) of Italian American versus Jewish American New Yorkers. In the NPR interview linked below, Labov talks about Irish origin features being the most stigmatized. These differences are relatively minor, more of degree than kind. All groups share the relevant features. It is possible that there are substantial differences, but like geographic differences, these have not been found.

Sam Chwat, a prominent speech therapist, shares the widely held belief of native New Yorkers that it is possible to make clear distinctions among the accents of different ethnic groups:

People talk about borough-defined New York accents, but, really, the different types of New York accents are ethnic," Mr. Chwat said. "You have the Jewish accent, as typified by Jackie Mason or Fran Drescher, the Italian accent -- Robert De Niro or Tony Danza. There's the Irish New York accent, like Rosie O'Donnell or Rudy Giuliani, "Of course he's not Irish, but he speaks with a New York Irish speech pattern". [2]

One area that is likely to reveal robust patterns is usage among Orthodox Jews, sometimes referred to as Yeshivish, for the parochial high schools members of this community attend. Such features include fully released final stops and certain Yiddish contact features, such as topicalizations of direct objects, (e.g., constructions such as Esther, she saw! or A dozen knishes, you bought!) There is also substantial use of Yiddish and particularly Hebrew words. It could be argued that such features are not characteristic of New York dialect because they exist among Orthodox Jews in other dialect regions. Still, in combination with other New York dialect features they are characteristic of a specific local ethno-religious community. There is no research, however, establishing these facts in the New York Dialect literature.

African American New Yorkers often speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), though with some New York Dialect features, as do most children of Black Caribbean immigrants. Many Latinos speak another distinct ethnolect, New York Latino English, characterized by a varying mix of traditional New York dialect and AAVE features along with features of Portuguese and Spanish origin. There is a tendency for middle and upper middle class members of both groups to use more New York dialect features and lower income residents to use fewer. Many East Asian American and Middle Eastern New Yorkers may also speak a recognizable variety, though one much closer to standard American English. Thus, within the dialect region, the dialect is predominantly, though not exclusively, European American.

Social class factors

Nevertheless, not even all European American New Yorkers use this variety. Upper-middle class European American New Yorkers and suburban residents from educated backgrounds often speak with less conspicuous accents; in particular, many, though hardly all, use rhotic pronunciations instead of the less prestigious non-rhotic pronunciations while maintaining some less stigmatized features such as the low back chain shift and the short a split (see below).

Similarly, the children of professional white migrants from other parts of the US frequently do not have many New York dialect features, and as these two populations come to dominate the southern half of Manhattan and neighboring parts of Brooklyn, the dialect is retreating from their neighborhoods. Many teens attending expensive private prep schools are barely linguistically recognizable as New Yorkers. Nevertheless, many New Yorkers, particularly those of Southern and Eastern European descent from the middle- and working-class, retain varying degrees of what has been coined New Yorkese or Brooklynese within their daily speech.

Beyond New York

Many Jewish-Americans, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, throughout the United States have some features of a New York accent. This is the case even among some Jewish-Americans who have never lived in New York or New Jersey. This phenomenon is somewhat parallel to the spread of African American Vernacular English to the rest of the United States from its original location in the American South. Because so many Jewish-Americans have a New York-sounding accent, some people may mistakenly believe that a New York accent is a "Jewish accent," when actually, non-Jewish White New Yorkers generally speak with the same accent. Similarly, many Mafia films, most of them set in the 1940s, show many characters speaking English with a New York accent.

Linguistic features

Pronunciation

See the article International Phonetic Alphabet for explanations of the phonetic symbols used, as indicated between square brackets []. These represent actual pronunciations. The symbols in curved parentheses () are variables, in this case historical word classes that have different realizations between and within dialects. This system was developed by William Labov. A link to a site with an example text read in various accents, including New York, can be found under external links.

New York Dialect is predominantly characterized by the following sounds and speech patterns:

Vowels

• The low back chain shift The [ɔ] vowel sound of words like talk, law, cross, and coffee and the often homophonous [ɔr] in core and more are tensed and usually raised more than in General American. This vowel is typically above [ɔ], the corresponding vowel in General American; in the most extreme New York accents, it is even higher and possesses an inglide: [ʊə]. [ɑ] in father and [ɑr] in car are tensed and move to a position abandoned by [ɔ]. The result is that car is often similar to core in parts of New England. Some words not originally from this word class, such as God, on and Bob join the [ɑ] group. This shift is robust and has spread to many non-European American New Yorkers.

• The short a split There is a class of words, with a historical "short a" vowel, including plan, class, and bad, where the historical [æ] has undergone [æ]-tensing to [eə], or, in the most extreme accents, [ɪə], accompanied by an inglide. This class is similar to, but larger than, the class of words in which Received Pronunciation uses the so-called broad A.Other words, such as plaque, clatter, and bat, indicated as [æ], remain lax, with the result that bad and bat have different vowels. Versions of the short a split are found from Philadelphia to Southern New England.

• pre-r distinctions New York accents lack most of the mergers before medial [ɹ] that many other modern American accents possess:
  • The vowels in marry [mæɹi], merry [mɛɹi], and Mary [meəɹi] are distinct.
  • The vowels in furry [fɝi] and hurry [hʌɹi] are distinct
  • Words like orange and forest are pronounced [ɑɹəndʒ] and [fɑɹəst] with the same stressed vowel as pot, not with the same vowel as port as in much of the rest of the United States.

• The General American [ɝ] and [ɔɪ] : In the most old-fashioned and extreme New York–area accents, the vowel sounds of words like girl and of words like oil both become a diphthong [ɜɪ]. This is often misperceived by speakers of other accents as a "reversal" of the "er" and "oy" sounds, so that girl is pronounced "goil" and oil is pronounced "erl"; this leads to the caricature of New Yorkers saying things like "Joizey" (Jersey) and "terlet" (toilet). This particular speech pattern is no longer very prevalent; the character Archie Bunker from the 1970's show All In The Family was a good example of a speaker who had this feature. Younger New Yorkers (born since about 1950) are likely to use a rhotic [ɝ] in bird even if they use nonrhotic pronunciations of beard, bared, bard, board, boor, and butter. Similarly, the line-loin merger is sporadically heard in New York.

Consonants

• r-lessness The traditional New York–area accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the sound [ɹ] does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no [ɹ] in words like park [pɔːk] (with vowel raised due to the low-back chain shift), butter [bʌɾə], or here [hiə]. This feature is slowly losing ground, as discussed above. Non-rhoticity now happens sometimes in New Yorkers with otherwise rhotic speech if r 's are located in unaccented syllables particularly in pre-vocalic position. Non-rhotic speakers usually exhibit an intrusive or linking r, similar to other non-rhotic dialect speakers.

• Dark (l) onsets This feature has rarely been commented on but it is robust. A dark variant of (l) is used before vowels like the (l) used in most English after vowels. In other words, in New York dialect, the (l) is made before vowels with the tongue bunched towards the back of the mouth as it is after vowels. In much US English, the prevowel version has a light variant, with the tongue bunched more towards the front. In effect, this means that the beginning sound of lull and level approximates the final one.

• Dentalization (t) and (d) are often pronounced with the tongue tip touching the teeth rather than the alveolar ridge (just above the teeth), as is typical in most varieties of English. Also, these sounds become affricates (sounds with a burst and then a substantial frication, like [tʃ] (the sound frequently represented orthographically by <ch>) before r.

• (dh/th) fortition Some speakers replace the dental fricatives [θ, ð] with dental variants of stops [t, d], so that words like thing and this sound similar to "ting" and "dis". This feature is highly stigmatized and is becoming less and less frequent. However affricate pronunciations are common.

• Intrusive g. In most varieties of English, the velar nasal [ŋ], written as <ng> is pronounced as [ŋ] rather than [ŋɡ]. However, in strong versions of New York dialect, the [ɡ] is variably pronounced before a vowel as a velar stop. This leads to the stereotype of ‘’Long Island’’ being pronounced as [lʊɘŋˈɡɑɪ.lɘnd] popularly written, Lawn Guyland. Another very frequent pronunciation which does omit the [ɡ] is [lɒ͡ɐˈŋai.lənd̪] with the stress on the first syllable in Island and beginning with [ŋ], as though it were Law Ngisland.

Syntax

• Indirect questions. Word order of the original question is preserved in indirect questions, at least those introduced by wh-words, for example: He wanted to know when will he come instead of He wanted to know when he will come; or, She asked why don’t you want any instead of the standard She asked why you don’t want any.

Lexicon

There are numerous words used mainly in New York, mostly associated with immigrant languages. A curious split in usage, reflective of the city's racial divide, involves the word punk. In the African American and Latino communities, the word tends to be used as a synonym for weak, someone unwilling or unable to defend her or usually himself or perhaps loser. That usage appears to descend from the AAVE meaning of male receptive participant in anal sex, a meaning which, in turn, may be largely lost among youth. Although this loser sense is expanding to younger European American and perhaps Asian American speakers with considerable contact with AAVE culture, an older usage, in which the term means youthful delinquent is probably still more common. Thus a newspaper article that refers to, say, some arrested muggers, as punks can have two different meanings to two different readers. Of course, the term also unambiguously means the follower of a particular musical and fashion peer cultural style (i.e. Punk rock).

One curious example of New York English is that New Yorkers stand "on line", whereas most other English speakers stand "in line". Some New Yorkers may say that they made a mistake "on accident," as opposed to "by accident".

History

The origins of the dialect are diverse, and the source of many features is probably not recoverable. Labov has pointed out that the short a split is found in southern England as mentioned above. He also claims that the vocalization and subsequent loss of (r) was copied from the prestigious London pronunciation, and so it started among the upper classes in New York and only later moved down the socioeconomic scale. This aristocratic r-lessness can be heard, for instance, in recordings of Franklin Roosevelt. After WWII, the r-ful pronunciation became the prestige norm, and what was once the upper class pronunciation became a vernacular one.

Other vernacular pronunciations, such as the dental (d)'s and (t)'s may come from contact with languages such as Italian and Yiddish. Grammatical structures, such as the lack of inversion in indirect questions, have the flavor of contact with an immigrant language. As stated above, many words common in New York are of immigrant roots.

See also

• Regional Vocabularies of American English

External links

• Varieties of English: New York City phonology from the University of Arizona's Language Samples Project
• William Labov's webpage There are links to many sites related to dialects, including references to his early work on New York dialect and the Atlas of North American English.
• [3] A paper by Labov on dialect diversity, including information on NY dialect phonology.
• [4] A link to an NPR interview with Professor Labov on NY dialect.
• The New York Latino English Project The site of the New York Latino English project, which studies the native English spoken by New York Latinos.
• [5] A site with samples of speech in various dialects, including New York.

References

• Labov, William (1982) The social stratification of English in New York City Center for Applied Linguistics ISBN 0-87281-149-2
• Labov, William (1973) Sociolinguistic Patterns U. of Pennsylvania Press ISBN 0-8122-1052-2*
• Labov, William (1994) Principles of Linguistic Change: Volume 1: Internal Factors Blackwell ISBN 0-631-17914-3
• Labov, William (2001) Atlas of North American English DeGruyter ISBN 3-11-016746-8
• Labov, William (2001) Principles of Linguistic Change: Volume 2: Social Factors Blackwell ISBN 0-631-17916-X
• Newman, Michael (2005) "New York Talk" in American Voices Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward (eds). p.82-87 Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-2109-2
• Slomanson, Peter & Michael Newman (2004) “Peer Group Identification and Variation in New York Latino English Laterals” English Worldwide, 25 (2) pp. 199-216 (http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=EWW)
• Wolfram, Walt & Nancy Schilling Estes (2006) American English 2nd edition Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-1265-4
• Wolfram, Walt & Ward, Ben (2005) American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-2109-2

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