New York City English | |
---|---|
Region | New York metropolitan area |
Ethnicity | Various (see Demographics of New York City) |
Indo-European
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Early forms | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Glottolog | newy1234 |
IETF | en-u-sd-usny |
New York City English, or Metropolitan New York English, [1] is a regional dialect of American English spoken primarily in New York City and some of its surrounding metropolitan area. It is described by sociolinguist William Labov as the most recognizable regional dialect in the United States. [2] Its pronunciation system—the New York accent—is widely represented in American media by many public figures and fictional characters. Major features of the accent include a high, gliding /ɔ/ vowel (in words like talk and caught); a split of the "short a" vowel /æ/ into two separate sounds; variable dropping of r sounds; and a lack of the cot–caught , Mary–marry–merry , and hurry–furry mergers heard in many other American accents.
Today, New York City English is associated particularly with urban New Yorkers of lower and middle socioeconomic status who are descended from 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants. [3] The dialect is spoken in all five boroughs of the City and throughout Long Island's Nassau County; it is also heard to varying degrees in Suffolk County (Long Island), Westchester County, and Rockland County of New York State plus Hudson County, Bergen County, and the city of Newark (Essex County) in northeastern New Jersey. [4]
The origins of many of New York City English's diverse features are probably not recoverable. New York City English, largely with the same major pronunciation system popularly recognized today, was first reproduced in literature and scientifically documented in the 1890s. [5] It was then, and still mostly is, associated with ethnically diverse European-American native-English speakers. The entire Mid-Atlantic United States, including both New York City and the Delaware Valley (whose own distinct dialect centers around Philadelphia and Baltimore) shares certain key features, including a high /ɔ/ vowel with a glide (sometimes called the aww vowel) as well as a phonemic split of the short a vowel, /æ/ (making gas and gap, for example, have different vowels sounds)—New York City's split not identical though to Philadelphia's. Linguist William Labov has pointed out that a similarly structured (though differently pronounced) split is found today even in the southern accents of England; thus, a single common origin of this split may trace back to colonial-era England. [a]
New York City became an urban economic power in the eighteenth century, with the city's financial elites maintaining close ties with the British Empire even after the Revolutionary War. According to Labov, New York City speakers' loss of the r sound after vowels (incidentally, not found in the nearby Delaware Valley) began as a nineteenth-century imitation of the prestigious British feature, consistently starting among the upper classes in New York City before spreading to other socioeconomic classes. [6] After World War II, social perceptions reversed and r-preserving (rhotic) pronunciations became the new American prestige standard, rejecting East Coast and British accent features, [7] while postwar migrations transferred rhotic speakers directly to New York City from other regions of the country. The result is that non-rhoticity, which was once a high-status feature and later a city-wide feature, has been diminishing and now, since the mid-twentieth century onward, largely remains only among lower-status New Yorkers. [8] Today, New York City metropolitan accents are often rhotic or variably rhotic.
Other features of the dialect, such as the dental pronunciations of d and t, and related th-stopping, likely come from contact with foreign languages, particularly Italian and Yiddish, brought into New York City through its huge immigration waves of Europeans during the mid-to-late nineteenth century and twentieth century. Grammatical structures, such as the lack of inversion in indirect questions, similarly suggest contact with immigrant languages, plus several words common in the city are derived from such foreign languages. [9]
Philadelphians born in the twentieth century exhibit a short-a split system that some linguists regard as a simplification of the very similar New York City short-a split. [10] Younger Philadelphians, however, are retreating from many of the traditional features shared in common with New York City. [11] Due to an influx of immigrants from New York City and neighboring New Jersey to southern Florida, some resident southern Floridians now speak with an accent reminiscent of a New York accent. Additionally, as a result of social and commercial contact between New Orleans, Louisiana and New York City, [12] the traditional accent of New Orleans, known locally as "Yat", bears distinctive similarities with the New York accent, including the (moribund) coil–curl merger, raising of the /ɔ/ vowel to [ɔə], a similar split in the short-a system, and th-stopping. Similarly, dialectal similarities suggest that older New York City English also influenced Cincinnati, Ohio and Albany, New York, whose older speakers in particular may still exhibit a short-a split system that linguists suggest is an expanded or generalized variant of the New York City short-a system. Certain New York City dialect features also understandably appear in New York Latino English.
Though William Labov argued in 2010 that the New York City accent is basically stable at the moment, [13] some recent studies have revealed a trend of recession in most features of the accent, especially among younger speakers from middle-class or higher backgrounds. Documented loss of New York City accent features includes the loss of the coil–curl merger (now almost completely extinct), non-rhoticity, and the extremely raised long vowel [ɔ] (as in talk, cough, or law). Researchers proposed that the motivation behind these recessive trends is the stigmatization of the typical New York City accent since the mid-1900s as being associated with a poorer or working-class background, often also corresponding with particular ethnic identities. While earlier projects detected trends of emphasizing New York City accents as part of a process of social identification, recent research attributes the loss of typical accent features to in-group ethnic distancing. In other words, many of the young generations of ethnic groups who formerly were the most representative speakers of the accent are currently avoiding its features to not stand out socially or ethnically. [14]
The pronunciation of New York City English, most popularly acknowledged by the term New York accent, is readily noticed and stereotyped, garnering considerable attention in American culture. [15] Some distinctive phonological features include its traditional dropping of r except before vowels, a short-a split system (in which, for example, the a in gas is not assonant to the a in gap), a high gliding /ɔ/ vowel (in words like talk, thought, all, etc. and thus an absence of the cot–caught merger), [15] absence of the Mary–marry–merry merger, and the highly stigmatized (and largely now-extinct) coil–curl merger. [16]
These are some words or grammatical constructions used mainly in Greater New York City:
The word punk tends to be used as a synonym for "weak", "someone unwilling or unable to defend himself" or perhaps "loser", though it appears to descend from an outdated New York African-American English meaning of male receptive participant in anal sex. [21]
New York City speakers have some unique conversational styles. Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen notes in a New York Times article it has "an emphasis to involve the other person, rather than being considerate. It would be asking questions as a show of interest in the other person, whereas in other parts of [the] country, people don't ask because it might put the person on the spot." Metro New Yorkers "stand closer, talk louder, and leave shorter pauses between exchanges," Tannen said. "I call it 'cooperative overlap'. It's a way of showing interest and enthusiasm, but it's often mistaken for interrupting by people from elsewhere in the country." On the other hand, linguist William Labov demurs, "there's nothing known to linguists about 'normal New York City conversation.'" [22]
The New York City accent has a strong presence in media; pioneer variationist sociolinguist William Labov describes it as the most recognizable variety of North American English. [2] The following famous people are native New York City–area speakers—including some speakers of other varieties native to the region—that all demonstrate typical features of the New York City accent.
Many fictional characters in popular films and television shows have used New York City English, whether or not the actors portraying them are native speakers of the dialect. Some examples are listed below.
The accent is not spoken in the rest of New York State beyond the immediate New York City metropolitan area. Specifically, the upper Hudson Valley mixes New York City and Western New England accent features, while Central and Western New York belong to the same dialect region as Great Lakes cities such as Chicago and Detroit, a dialect region known as the Inland North. [200] [201]
New York City English is confined to a geographically small but densely populated area of New York State including all five boroughs of New York City as well as many parts of Long Island; the dialect region spans all of Nassau County and some of Suffolk County. [4] [202] [203] [204] Moreover, the English of the Hudson Valley forms a continuum of speakers who exhibit more features of New York City English the closer they are to the city itself; [205] some of the dialect's features may be heard as far north as the state capital of Albany. [206]
A small portion of southwestern Connecticut speaks a similar dialect, primarily speakers in Fairfield County and as far as New Haven County. [207]
The northeastern quarter of New Jersey, prominently Hudson, Bergen, Union, and Essex Counties, including the municipalities of Weehawken, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark, [208] plus Middlesex and Monmouth Counties, are all within the New York metropolitan area and thus also home to the major features of New York City English. With the exception of New York City's immediate neighbors like Jersey City and Newark, [6] the New York metropolitan dialect as spoken in New Jersey is rhotic (or fully r-pronouncing) so that, whereas a Brooklynite might pronounce "over there" something like "ovah theah/deah" [oʊvəˈd̪ɛə], an Elizabeth native might say "over there/dare" [oʊvɚˈd̪ɛɚ]. The Atlas of North American English by William Labov et al. shows that the short-a pattern of New York City has diffused to many r-pronouncing communities in northern New Jersey, like Rutherford (Labov's birthplace) and North Plainfield. However, in these communities, the function word constraint of the city's short-a pattern is lost, and the open syllable constraint is used only variably. [209]
The following is a list of notable lifelong native speakers of the rhotic New York City English of northeastern New Jersey:
Comedian Joey Diaz, [224] late singer Frank Sinatra, [225] and sportscaster Dick Vitale [226] are examples of significantly non-rhotic speakers from New Jersey.
Caesar's accent is a Brooklyn-Bronx amalgam.
And even though brilliant writer Robert Caro and physicist Richard Feynman both have/had strong New York accents ...
For years, the New York accent—from Rosie Perez to Spike Lee, Fran Drescher to Archie Bunker—has been studied, extolled and derided.
Certainly, Mr. Trump is not the first conservative demagogue with our distinctive New York vowels. You can hear Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity's New York origins in every diatribe.
'I grew up in Queens,' says Peters, who ... has kept the borough accent.
'We're in the heart of the West Midlands,' says the voice, its heavy New York accent reassuringly familiar ... The voice belongs to the American film star Telly Savalas ...
Her thick accent — she and Bernie Sanders graduated from the same Brooklyn high school, James Madison ...
Spector was quite short, with a weak chin and a pronounced, almost absurd Bronx accent. (His voice was in a Stan Freberg or 'I'm depraved on account I'm deprived!' vein.)
his already taut New York accent
Joey Wheeler is known for his ... strong Brooklyn accent
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)DeVito -- with his ... broad Jersey accent ...
... there was that New Jersey accent I was hoping to hear.
Although matchmaker Patti Stanger dresses in expensive designer clothes and drives luxury cars, she retains a working-class New Jersey accent from her childhood.
... Wylde's callous cackles show that there is more to his gruff, intimidating, North Jersey accent ...
But with his Italian heritage and lingering Hoboken accent ...
... that distinctive North Jersey accent has been the clarion call of college basketball.
American English (AmE), sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce; and an official language of most U.S. states. Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide.
North American English is the most generalized variety of the English language as spoken in the United States and Canada. Because of their related histories and cultures, plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, and grammar of American English and Canadian English, the two spoken varieties are often grouped together under a single category. Canadians are generally tolerant of both British and American spellings, with British spellings of certain words preferred in more formal settings and in Canadian print media; for some other words the American spelling prevails over the British.
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American, is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English.
Southern American English or Southern U.S. English is a regional dialect or collection of dialects of American English spoken throughout the Southern United States, primarily by White Southerners and increasingly concentrated in more rural areas. As of 2000s research, its most innovative accents include southern Appalachian and certain Texan accents. Such research has described Southern American English as the largest American regional accent group by number of speakers. More formal terms then developed to characterize this dialect within American linguistics include "Southern White Vernacular English" and "Rural White Southern English". However, more commonly in the United States, the variety is known as the Southern accent or simply Southern.
A Boston accent is a local accent of Eastern New England English, native specifically to the city of Boston and its suburbs. Northeastern New England English is classified as traditionally including New Hampshire, Maine, and all of eastern Massachusetts, while some uniquely local vocabulary appears only around Boston. A 2006 study co-authored by William Labov claims that the accent remains relatively stable, though a 2018 study suggests the accent's traditional features may be retreating, particularly among the city's younger residents, and becoming increasingly confined to the historically Irish-American neighborhood of South Boston.
A Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is any of various accents of English that are perceived as blending features from both American and British English. Most commonly, the informal label refers to accents of the late 19th century to mid-20th century spoken by the Northeastern American upper class, as well as related accents in the early half of the 20th century taught at American schools of acting, which incorporated features from Received Pronunciation, the prestige accent of British English. Consequently, this speaking style also became associated with certain Hollywood actors in that era.
A Baltimore accent, also known as Baltimorese and sometimes humorously spelled Bawlmerese or Ballimorese, is an accent or sub-variety of Delaware Valley English that originates among blue-collar residents of Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It extends into the Baltimore metropolitan area and northeastern Maryland.
Eastern New England English, historically known as the Yankee dialect since at least the 19th century, is the traditional regional dialect of Maine, New Hampshire, and the eastern half of Massachusetts. Features of this variety once spanned an even larger dialect area of New England, for example, including the eastern halves of Vermont and Connecticut for those born as late as the early twentieth century. Studies vary as to whether the unique dialect of Rhode Island technically falls within the Eastern New England dialect region.
The English language as primarily spoken by Hispanic Americans on the East Coast of the United States demonstrates considerable influence from New York City English and African-American Vernacular English, with certain additional features borrowed from the Spanish language. Though not currently confirmed to be a single stabilized dialect, this variety has received some attention in the academic literature, being recently labelled New York Latino English, referring to its city of twentieth-century origin, or, more inclusively, East Coast Latino English. In the 1970s scholarship, the variety was more narrowly called (New York) Puerto Rican English or Nuyorican English. The variety originated with Puerto Ricans moving to New York City after World War I, though particularly in the subsequent generations born in the New York dialect region who were native speakers of both English and often Spanish. Today, it covers the English of many Hispanic and Latino Americans of diverse national heritages, not simply Puerto Ricans, in the New York metropolitan area and beyond along the northeastern coast of the United States.
In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.
Philadelphia English or Delaware Valley English is a variety or dialect of American English native to Philadelphia and extending into Philadelphia's metropolitan area throughout the Delaware Valley, including southeastern Pennsylvania, all of South Jersey, counties of northern Delaware, and the northern Eastern Shore of Maryland. Aside from Philadelphia and the surrounding counties and arguably Baltimore, the dialect is spoken in places such as Reading, Camden, Atlantic City, Wilmington, Vineland, and Dover. Philadelphia English is one of the best-studied types of English, as Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania is the home institution of pioneering sociolinguist William Labov. Philadelphia English shares certain features with New York City English and Midland American English, although it remains a distinct dialect of its own. Philadelphia and Baltimore accents together fall under what Labov describes as a single Mid-Atlantic regional dialect.
North American English regional phonology is the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken North American English —what are commonly known simply as "regional accents". Though studies of regional dialects can be based on multiple characteristics, often including characteristics that are phonemic, phonetic, lexical (vocabulary-based), and syntactic (grammar-based), this article focuses only on the former two items. North American English includes American English, which has several highly developed and distinct regional varieties, along with the closely related Canadian English, which is more homogeneous geographically. American English and Canadian English have more in common with each other than with varieties of English outside North America.
New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping". Accordingly, one linguistic division of New England is into Eastern versus Western New England English, as defined in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE further argues for a division between Northern versus Southern New England English, especially on the basis of the cot–caught merger and fronting. The ANAE also categorizes the strongest differentiated New England accents into four combinations of the above dichotomies, simply defined as follows:
Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.
Older Southern American English is a diverse set of American English dialects of the Southern United States spoken most widely up until the American Civil War of the 1860s, before gradually transforming among its White speakers, first, by the turn of the 20th century, and, again, following the Great Depression, World War II, and, finally, the Civil Rights Movement. By the mid-20th century, among White Southerners, these local dialects had largely consolidated into, or been replaced by, a more regionally unified Southern American English. Meanwhile, among Black Southerners, these dialects transformed into a fairly stable African-American Vernacular English, now spoken nationwide among Black people. Certain features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, like non-rhoticity, though typically only among Black speakers or among very localized White speakers.
Northern American English or Northern U.S. English is a class of historically related American English dialects, spoken by predominantly white Americans, in much of the Great Lakes region and some of the Northeast region within the United States. The North as a superdialect region is best documented by the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE) in the greater metropolitan areas of Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, Western and Central New York, Northwestern New Jersey, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Northern Ohio, Northern Indiana, Northern Illinois, Northeastern Nebraska, and Eastern South Dakota, plus among certain demographics or areas within Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and New York's Hudson Valley. The ANAE describes that the North, at its core, consists of the Inland Northern dialect and Southwestern New England dialect.
Despite popular stereotypes in the media that there is a singular New Jersey accent, there are in fact several distinct accents native to the U.S. state of New Jersey, none being confined only to New Jersey. Therefore, the term New Jersey English is diverse in meaning and often misleading, and it may refer to any of the following dialects of American English or even to intermediate varieties that blend the features of these multiple dialects.
The sound system of New York City English is popularly known as a New York accent. The accent of the New York metropolitan area is one of the most recognizable in the United States, largely due to its popular stereotypes and portrayal in radio, film, and television. Several other common names exist based on more specific locations, such as Bronx accent, Brooklyn accent, Queens accent, Long Island accent, North Jersey accent. Research supports the continued classification of all these under a single label, despite some common assumptions among locals that they meaningfully differ.
The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
Western New England English refers to the varieties of New England English native to Vermont, Connecticut, and the western half of Massachusetts; New York State's Hudson Valley also aligns to this classification. Sound patterns historically associated with Western New England English include the features of rhoticity, the horse–hoarse merger, and the father–bother merger, none of which are features traditionally shared in neighboring Eastern New England English. The status of the cot–caught merger in Western New England is inconsistent, being complete in the north of this dialect region (Vermont), but incomplete or absent in the south, with a "cot–caught approximation" in the middle area.