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The variation of the English language spoken in the New York City and North Jersey region is often considered to be one of the most recognizable accents within American English.
The New York Accent Made famous world-wide by countless movies and television programs, the easily recognizable New York accent is spoken by a significant portion of native-born residents of New York City and its immediate vicinity in southeastern New York State. In particular, the city boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens as well as western Long Island are considered to be areas where the accent is most often heard from among the public. In these areas, the countless families that have resided here for several generations are the ones who speak with the accent most strongly.
However, not all residents of this region speak with distinct New York accents. Generally, upper-middle class New Yorkers from educated backgrounds speak without any trace of the accent. This includes the majority of residents of Manhattan. Many others though, particularly those of Southern and Eastern European descent from the middle- and working-class, do tend to have varying degrees of what has been coined New Yorkese within their daily regular speech. As can be inferred, the presence or absence of the accent can be taken as a marker of social class in the New York area.
The accent is closely confined to the geographically small, but densely populated New York City Dialect Region, which consists of the city's five Boroughs, western Long Island, and certain neighboring New Jersey areas like Newark, Jersey City, Bayonne, Hoboken, and Fort Lee.
The New Jersey Accent Generally, the so-called Jersey Accent or North Jersey Accent spoken in northern New Jersey is simply a softer version of the English language spoken by residents of New York and is very frequently mistaken for a New York accent by people from other parts of the United States. It is sometimes even mistaken by people from the region itself, although most native-born New Jerseyans and New Yorkers can make the distinction when they listen carefully. Most colloquial greetings and expressions used in New York are also said by New Jerseyans and with the same frequency. However, north Jersey speech is free of certain New York City features which are heavily stigmatized: Jerseyans usually pronounce all their r's and say "mad" and "pass" with the same vowel of "mat" and "pat."
This accent is found in the northeast quarter of New Jersey, and is basically the part of the state which is in New York City's metropolitan area but not the dialect region. It includes cities such as Rutherford and Rahway.
Contrary to popular belief, no one in any part of New Jersey ever refers to their state as Joisey. This word is, in fact, a mistaken attempt by non-New Jersey residents to speak with a Jersey accent.
The Sound (See the article X-SAMPA for explanations of the phonetic symbols used.)
New York-New Jersey English is predominantly characterized by the following sounds and speech patterns:
- The "aw" vowel sound of words like talk, law, cross, and coffee is back and rounded, and higher than its equivalent in many other U.S. dialects. In some New York–area accents, this vowel is [O:], not unlike the corresponding vowel in Received Pronunciation; in the most extreme New York accents, it is even higher and possesses an inglide: [U@].
- There is a class of words with a historical "short a" vowel, including plan, class, and bad, where the vowel has become higher than historical [{] and developed an inglide: [e@], or, in the most extreme accents, [I@]. This class is similar to, but larger than, the class of words in which Received Pronunciation uses the so-called broad A.
- New York accents make a greater variety of distinctions between short and long vowels before medial \r`\ than many other modern American accents do: New York accents maintain the distinctions between the vowels in marry [m{r`i], merry [mEr`i], and Mary [me@r`i], and between mirror [mIr`@r`] and nearer [ni@r`@r`]. Similarly, words like orange and forest are pronounced [Ar`@ndZ] and [fAr`@st] with the same stressed vowel as pot, not with the same vowel as port as in much of the rest of the United States. New York shares these features with the Boston accent and Received Pronunciation.
- The traditional New York–area accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the phoneme \r`\ does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no \r`\ in words like park [pA:k], butter [bV4@], or here [hi@]. This feature is somewhat less widespread than the two above; there are plenty of New Yorkers who have fully rhotic English.
- 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 [VI]. 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" and "terlet". (This particular speech pattern is no longer very prevalent; the character Archie Bunker was a good example of a speaker who had this feature.)
- Some speakers replace the dental fricatives [T] and [D] with dentalized stops, so that words like thing and this sound similar to "ting" and "dis". This feature is also becoming less and less frequent.
Related topics
External links - Atlas of North American English, Chapter 17: New York City and the Mid-Atlantic States (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch17/Ch17.html)
- Varieties of English: New York City phonology (http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Northeast/NewYorkEnglish/nyphon.html) from the University of Arizona's Language Samples Project
- The Atlas of North American English, Chapter 17: New York City and the Mid-Atlantic States (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch17/Ch17.html)
- Varieties of English: New York City phonology (http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Northeast/NewYorkEnglish/nyphon.html) from the University of Arizona's Language Samples Project
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