New York accent
The sound system of New York City English is popularly known as a New York accent. The New York metropolitan accent is one of the most recognizable accents of the United States, largely due to its popular stereotypes and portrayal in radio, film, and television. The accent is strongest among white members of the middle and lower class in New York City proper, western Long Island, and northeastern New Jersey, though it may be spoken to various extents by all classes in the New York City metropolitan area, and some of its features have diffused to many other areas; for example, the accent spoken by natives of New Orleans, Louisiana, locally known as Yat, is strikingly similar to the New York accent. The New York accent is not spoken in the rest of New York state beyond the immediate metropolitan area; Upstate New York speakers instead generally fall under the Hudson Valley and Inland North dialects. The traditional New York accent is predominantly characterized by the following sounds and speech patterns:
Vowels
- Cot–caught distinction: The vowel sound and the often homophonous in core and more are tensed and usually raised more than in General American, varying on a scale from to, while typically accompanied by an inglide that produces variants like or. These sounds are kept strongly distinct from the in words like father, palm, wash, and bra; therefore, cot is something like and caught is something like.
- Father–bother variability: Linguistically conservative speakers retain three separate low back vowels: , , and , thus with words like father and bother not rhyming, as they do for most other Americans. Among such conservative speakers, descendants of Middle English short o with final voiced consonants,, or , and some Middle English short a words, such as wash, take on the rounded sound. However, Labov et al report that which words fall into the class and which words fall into the class may vary from speaker to speaker. Aside from such speakers with this relic feature, however, a majority of New Yorkers exhibit the father–bother merger.
- Short-a split system: New York City English uses a complicated short-a split system, in which all words with the "short a" can be split into two separate classes on the basis of the sound of this vowel; thus, for example, words like badge, class, lag, mad, and pan are pronounced with an entirely different vowel than words like bat, clap, lack, map, and patch. In the former set of words, historical is raised and tensed to an ingliding diphthong of the type or even. The latter set of words, meanwhile, retains a lax, low-front, typical sound. A strongly related split has occurred in the Philadelphia and Baltimore dialects. Although the lax and the tense reflexes of /æ/ are separate phonemes in these dialects, their distribution is largely predictable.
- Conservative and : as in goat does not undergo fronting; instead, it remains and may even have a lowered starting point. This groups New York with the "North" class of dialects rather than the "Midland", in which is fronted. Relatedly, as in is not fronted and remains a back vowel or, although it may be more fronted following a coronal consonant, such as in loose, too, and zoom. This general lack of fronting of and also distinguishes New York from nearby Philadelphia. Some speakers have a separate phoneme in words such as tune, news, duke. The phonemic status of this vowel is marginal. For example, Labov reports that New Yorkers may contrast do with dew though they may also have do. Also, Labov et al. report yod-dropping also to have diffused as a characteristic for other speakers of New York English.
- Backed and fronted : The nucleus of the diphthong is traditionally a back and sometimes rounded vowel or , while the nucleus of the diphthong is a front vowel . The sociolinguistic evidence suggests that both of these developments are active changes. The fronted nucleus in and the backed nucleus in are more common among younger speakers, women, and the working and lower middle classes.
- Pre- distinctions: New York accents lack most of the mergers that occur with vowels before an, which are otherwise common in other varieties of North American English. There is typically a Mary–marry–merry three-way distinction, in which the vowels in words like marry, merry, and Mary do not merge. The vowels in furry and hurry are distinct. Also, words like orange, horrible, Florida and forest are pronounced with or, the same stressed vowel as part, not with the same vowel as port as in much of the rest of the United States. In the table below, the New York accent distinctively falls under "some East-Coast and Southern American" accents:
- Back vowel chain shift before :, as in Tory, bore, or shore merges with a tongue movement upward in the mouth to, as in tour, boor, or sure. This is followed by the possibility of, as in tarry or bar, also moving also upward towards ~. In non-rhotic New York speech, this means that born can be and barn can be. However, unlike the firmness of this shift in Philadelphia English, the entire process is still transitioning and variable in New York City English.
- Coil–curl merger: One of the stereotypes of New York speech is the use of a front-rising diphthong in words with . This stereotype is popularly represented in stock phrases like "toity-toid" for thirty-third. The phonetic reality of this variant is actually unrounded ; thus,. This vowel was also used for the vowel. Labov's data from the mid-1960s indicated this highly stigmatized form was recessive even then. Only two of his 51 speakers under age 20 used the form as compared with those over age 50 of whom 23 out of 30 used the r-less form. Younger New Yorkers are consequently likely to use a rhotic for the diaphoneme , even if they use non-rhotic pronunciations of beard, bared, bard, board, boor, and butter. Labov considers that the phoneme "lingers on in a modified form". In other words, Labov is saying that the in New York is slightly raised compared to other dialects. Despite the near-extinction of this feature, Newman found variably in one of his participants born in the late 1980s. Related to the non-rhotic variant, a form of intrusive r was also once reported for words so that may occur with an r-colored vowel, apparently as a result of hypercorrection.
Consonants
- Non-rhoticity : The traditional metropolitan New York accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the sound does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no in words like park , butter, or here. However, modern New York City English is variably rhotic for the most part. The New York City accent also varies between pronounced and silenced in similar phonetic environment, even in the same word when repeated. Non-rhotic speakers usually exhibit a linking or intrusive R, similar to other non-rhotic dialect speakers.
- Laminal alveolar consonants: The alveolar consonants,,, and may be articulated with the tongue blade rather than the tip. Wells indicates that this articulation may, in some cases, also involve affrication, producing and. Also and are often pronounced with the tongue touching the teeth rather than the alveolar ridge, as is typical in most varieties of English. With, glottalization is reported to sometimes appear in a wider range of contexts in New York speech than in other American dialects, appearing, for example, before syllabic . At the same time, before a pause, a released final stop is often more common than a glottal stop in New York accents than in General American ones; for example, bat as rather than.
- *The universal usage of "dark L", common throughout the U.S., is also possible in the New York accent. Newman reports even in initial position to be relatively dark for all accents of the city except the accents of Latinos. However, in the mid-twentieth century, both dark and "not quite so 'dark'" variants of are reported. The latter occurs initially or in initial consonant clusters, pronounced with the point or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, though this variant is not as "clear" as in British Received Pronunciation.
- *Also, is reported as commonly becoming postalveolar before, making a word like William for some speakers or even.
- *Vocalization of : L-vocalization is common in New York though it is perhaps not as pervasive as in some other dialects. Like its fellow liquid, it may be vocalized when it appears finally or before a consonant.
- Th-stopping: As in many other dialects, the interdental fricatives and are often realized as dental or alveolar stop consonants, famously like and, or affricates and. Labov found this alternation to vary by class with the non-fricative forms appearing more regularly in lower and working class speech. Unlike the reported changes with, the variation with and appears to be stable. Historical dialect documents suggest th-stopping probably originated from the massive influence of immigrant German, Italian, Irish, and Yiddish speakers to the city starting in the mid-19th century.
- Reduction of to : New Yorkers typically do not allow to precede ; this gives pronunciations like yuman and yooge for human and huge.
Variability
Social and geographic variation
Despite common references to a "Bronx accent", "Brooklyn accent", "Long Island accent", etc. no published study has found any feature that varies internally within the dialect due to any specific geographic differences. Impressions that the dialect varies geographically are likely a byproduct of class or ethnic variation, and even some of these assumptions are losing credibility in light of accent convergences among the current younger generations of various ethnic backgrounds. Speakers from Queens born in the 1990s and later are showing a cot–caught merger more than in other boroughs, though this too is likely class- or ethnic-based rather than location-based. Increasing levels of the cot–caught merger among these Queens natives also appeared correlated with the fact of their majority foreign parentage. A lowering of New York's traditionally raised caught vowel is similarly taking place among younger residents of Manhattan's Lower East Side as follows: most intensely among white New Yorkers, fairly intensely among Latino and Asian New Yorkers, but not among African-American New Yorkers; this reverses a trend documented among white Lower East Siders in the 20th century.Ethnic variation
The classic New York dialect is centered on middle- and working-class white Americans, and this ethnic cluster now accounts for less than half of the city's population, within which there is even some degree of ethnic variation. The variations of New York City English are a result of the waves of immigrants that settled in the city, from the earliest settlement by the Dutch and English, followed in the 19th century by the Irish and western Europeans. Over time these collective influences combined to give New York its distinctive accent.Up until the immigration acts of 1920 and 1924 that restricted southern and eastern European immigration, many Eastern European Jewish and Italian immigrants, as well as some later immigrants, arrived and further affected the region's speech. Sociolinguistic research, which is ongoing, suggests that some differentiation between these last groups' speech may exist. For example, William Labov found that Jewish-American New Yorkers were more likely than other groups to use the closest variants of and perhaps fully released final stops, while Italian-American New Yorkers were more likely than other groups to use the closest variants of . Labov also discusses Irish origin features being the most stigmatized. Still, Labov argues that these differences are relatively minor, more of degree than kind. All European American groups share the relevant features.
One area likely to reveal robust patterns is New York City English among Orthodox Jews, overlapping with Yeshiva English, which can exist outside of the New York metropolitan area as well. Such features include certain Yiddish grammatical contact features, such as topicalizations of direct objects or the general replacement of with, as stereotyped in the eye-dialect phrase "Lawn Guyland" for "Long Island", strongly used among Lubavitcher Jews, but a stereotype for the New York accent in general. There is also substantial use of Yiddish and particularly Hebrew words.
Black New Yorkers typically speak African-American Vernacular English, though sharing the New York accent's raised vowel. Many Latino New Yorkers speak a distinctly local ethnolect, New York Latino English, characterized by a varying mix of New York City English and AAVE features, along with some Spanish contact features. Asian American New Yorkers are not shown by studies to have any phonetic features that are overwhelmingly distinct, though studies of each ethnic group separately might yield different results. White New Yorkers alone have been traditionally documented as using a phonetic split of as follows: before voiceless consonants but elsewhere.