Accents, Brooklyn

  Over at Randy's place, he's got a neat post on the survival of Dutch in New York City.  Seems like it held on for a couple centuries after the English took it over.  In the post, Randy suggests that the “Brooklyn” accent derives from Dutch.  Peter takes issue, debate ensues. 

Goin' Back To Brooklyn @ Yahoo! Video

Here, I'd like to say three things about New York accents.

1. There are no geographic variations.  None.  Zip.  Say-roe.  All of what seems to be geographic variation is due to race, immigration, or social class.  All of it.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or f*@king with you.  I have been asked this question every goddamned time I go to Britain.  It ain't true.  Somebody from New York, they say different, they probably be playing games.   
2. The traditional New York accent is dead.  (For a brief period in college, I tried to affect one, for reasons which are beyond me.  My natural speech is bad enough.)  Its more modern variations are also in fact dying, save for ...
3. ... the accent exemplified by Rosie Perez, held by most children of Latino immigrants in the New York metropolitan area, and now spreading throughout the Northeast. It is somewhat different from the previously dominant version of the accent, and it is replacing that version very rapidly.  Even among non-Latinos.

For your edification, click here for Ms. Perez on Letterman, with the new New York accent.  It's worth it.  (For some reason, the damned embedding won't work.)  My older sister isn't quite young enough to talk like this, although I have some very non-Latino in-laws in their twenties who do.  You can see two more examples of the same accent coming from the eyewitnesses in the below BBC report around minute 2:06.

Finally, here is a fellow who gives pretty good lessons in the older version of New York English, the one I speak with my siblings.  He does confuse class and geography, presumably ingenuously, when he describes his accent as a mix of Westchester and Staten Island.  There is no speech difference between a blue-collar dude from Rosebank or one from southeastern Yonkers, or between the child of Ivy League graduates in Todt Hill or in Scarsdale.  He is simply cottoning on to the fact that there are a lot more upper-class types in Westchester County than in Richmond County, and a lot fewer plumbers and police officers. 

Now that you been schooled in the Kings English, what sort of English do you speak? 

Comments

[Will Baird]

What accent do I have. Oh gosh.

The base accent is a very midwesty-western US accent. However, after we moved from Cali to NM when I was a kid, everyone remarked that I had a nasal Cali accent. When I visited elsewhere, people noted that and the slightly sing-songy bits I'd picked up from NM.

So if you can imagine a std American - very, very generic, almost broadcast style - overlain with Cali nasalness and bits of NMican sing-song, ya got me.

[Dennis Brennan]

A Delaware County, Pennsylvania accent-- which is to say, a milder case of Philadelphia accent. I don't say "yiz" as the plural of "you", but I do say "wooder" for "water", and I use the same vowel for the word "car" that I do for the first syllable of "horrible", "forest", "Florida" and "Oregon".

I pronounce the letter "r", even at the end of words. I pronounce each of "Mary", "marry" and "merry" distinctly with each other, as I do "ten" and "tin", and "cot" and "caught".

[Will Baird]

marry, merry, and Mary are identical here. Ten and tin are distinct. Cot and caught are identical.

[Randy McDonald]

People tend to be surprised when they hear me speak, since despite my Prince Edward Island birth my accent is pretty close to standard Canadian English with a few minor tics.

It might be a consequence of my close attention to mass media; it might be a consequence of my hanging out with people who spoke standard forms of Canadian English; it might even demonstrate a hypercorrection towards standard forms of speech that some have told me is characteristic of women and gay men.

[Noel Maurer]

What was it about the videos that surprised you, Randy? You mentioned something on your blog. I'm curious to know about the stereotype you referred to; you know I won't be insulted.

(Thanks for the link, BTW --- I'd love to get your readers telling us about their accents. Where the hell is Charlie?)

[Noel Maurer]

Dennis: interesting. I should have some idea what a Philly-area accent is like, having spent more time there than in Boston over the last few years, but nothing is registering. I pronounce car and the first syllable of horrible the same, but not forest or Florida or Oregon. Harr-ible, but fawr-ist, Flawr-ida, and Awrih-gon.
Gotta pay more attention next time I'm down in Philly.

Will, you're in the Bay Area, right? I get cot and caught, but I'm pretty sure ten and tin are pronounced differently there. No? Am I confused? About your location or the nature of Bay Area speak?

Randy, a lot of people in New York have standard accents these days. More and more, in fact. Give it a few years and there'll only be a few people in a far burbs speaking like the fellow in the last video. The classic accent, the one you find in movies from the 1950s, "er" to "oi" and all that, that's already dead. The funny thing is that you can variation within families: my friend Guy speaks straight television and has for as long as we've know each other (which is waaaaaay long) while his sister sounds like Rosie Perez. Her Ph.D. in biology from Dartmouth seems to have lessened it, but less than you'd think. Did you have an accent that you lost as a teenager, or did you always speak Television?

Follow up question: my strong impression is that Television is pretty much the same on both sides of the 49th parallel these days, and there aren't any noticeable differences between standard American and standard Canadian. Is that wrong?

[Spike Gomes]

My first language is Television English, and with certain family members Hawaiian Creole English of the lighter variety being second in use. It's also very useful to use when traveling and I don't want to be understood for whatever reason.

[Peter]

it might even demonstrate a hypercorrection towards standard forms of speech that some have told me is characteristic of women and gay men

Not an accent per se, but one speech characteristic that some women - but almost no men - have involves very subtly converting most sentences into sounding like questions, so that sentences which end with periods sound almost as if they end with question marks.

[Randy McDonald]

"I'm curious to know about the stereotype you referred to; you know I won't be insulted."

Sure. It was just the relative non-existence of the "New Yawk" accent that surprised me. I was struck by that a bit, I think, when I was in the city in 2002, but I wasn't trying to be an amateur dialectologist at the time.

"Did you have an accent that you lost as a teenager, or did you always speak Television?"

I think that I had it for a long time, certainly before my teenage years were up.

It was a disconcerting experience to realize, a week after I arrived in Kingston ON for grad school, that I was in a place where the people actually talked the way that they did on television. Shock.

[Noel Maurer]

Peter? I think you're referring to uptalk? It's really common? In California? And lots of the rest of the U.S.? Even college students in New York? Among both men and women? I spoke this way myself? When I was in college out west? And people made fun of me? When I got back home?

Really, I did. And I really was mocked for it. "I don't know if you're going to lunch, Maurer! Why are you asking me?"

I'm kind of curious about the "almost no men" statement, though. How did you get that impression? It's not correct.

Here's a piece on uptalk.

Here's the classic article from 1993. I'm old enough to remember reading it in the original, back when I was in California. Having been recently mocked, it made an impression.

Here's a fun piece from our British friends on the spread of the phenomenon.

Stephen Pinker and Douglas Coupland would be two prominent uptalkers. Both from the West Coast, of course. That last article quotes towards the end somebody claiming it is more common in girls than boys, completely, like, contradicting the entire rest of the article?

And here is scholarly commentary and audio!

If you start listening for it, I will be astounded if you don't start hearing it among your male acquaintances. Unless none of them are from outside New York.

FWIW, I lost my uptalking at some point after it was pointed out to me that I'd picked it up. As an acquired accent, about which I felt more than faintly silly, that shouldn't be a surprise.

[Peter]

Maybe you're right, men uptalk too, it just seems to be more noticeable among women, esp. younger women.

[Peter Erwin]

Very interesting discussion of the NY accent!

Stephen Pinker and Douglas Coupland would be two prominent uptalkers. Both from the West Coast, of course.

Actually, Pinker is from Montreal ("the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal," according to the bio on his web page). Does he actually uptalk? I think he's in that article mainly as a (popular, well-known) linguistic authority, not as an example of the phenomenon.

Oh, and for what it's worth -- my accent is basically West Coast/Television. I do remember a few people in high school who had mild versions of the Valley/Surfer accent (this was in LA in the 80s).

[Dennis Brennan]

In the United States, one of the best ways to hear traditional local accents (in the cities, anyway) is to listen to people who call in to sports radio talk shows. In Philly, I'd recommend 610 AM in the morning (these are also the guys who gave the world the Wing Bowl).

[Noel Maurer]

D'oh! I knew that about Pinker, of course.

Here's the most common uptalk, so common many of y'all probably do it without realizing: introducing yourself.

"Hi, I'm Noel Maurer?" I caught myself doing this yesterday. Truth is, while the inflection rises, it doesn't really sound like a question. Although you are implicitly asking if the other person is expecting you.

Other than that, I'm pretty sure I unlearned most of the bad Californian habits that I picked up on college.

[Will Baird]

misunderstanding.

ten and tin are definitely different: "Ten and tin are distinct."

That's pretty accurate for NM too.

[Noel Maurer]

Oh, whoops. Dunno how I read that as "indistinct."

[Dennis Brennan]

By way of further comment on the Philly accent: just so the rest of the world is clear, it is _not_, _not_, _not_ the same as any sort of New York accent. Sly Stallone in the Rocky movies, I'm pointing at you. (Fluff-yens love the Rocky movies, but not as a linguistics manual.) Ours is closer to a Baltimore accent, really. Toni Collette in _Sixth Sense_ pretty much nailed the accent.

Chris Matthews from Hardball has one.

[Peter]

By way of further comment on the Philly accent: just so the rest of the world is clear, it is _not_, _not_, _not_ the same as any sort of New York accent. Sly Stallone in the Rocky movies, I'm pointing at you.

Stallone's accent is not really a New York accent, it's sort of sui generis, in fact I believe he has some sort of nerve damage that affects his speech. In any event, though he was born in New York he spent most of his childhood in Maryland.