Why the classic Noo Yawk accent is fading away

NY Post ^ | February 6, 2010 | SHEILA McCLEAR

[Scanian]

The first thing theatergoers will notice about the revival of "A View of the Bridge," Arthur Miller's 1950s drama about a working-class Italian-American family in Red Hook, is that the characters are speaking a different language: Brooklynese. You got a problem with that!?

You can hear the mellifluous — some might say grating — dialect being celebrated on Broadway by Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. But that may be the only place. Linguists say features of the classic accent are heard less and less in the city itself, especially among the younger generation. Mocked and stereotyped, the long o's and w's have fallen out of favor, unless you're auditioning for a mob film.

Will old Noo Yawk become a museum piece, the subway token of language?

[spetznaz]

That’s not the only accent gone. Listen to any news broadcast from the 60s. Then to one from the 30s. Then a current one. All 3 are very different.

[Yardstick]

btt

[9YearLurker]

That’s an incredibly in-depth story for the Post!

[RayChuang88]

I think today's modern communications networks managed to kill a lot of regional dialects. As such, we now consider fluent speakers of English as those who can speak with the BBC English accent (if you come from a Commonwealth country) or the accent-free American English you hear on radio and TV broadcasts in the USA. When I was working in the Bay Area, I used to know a Russian émigré at the workplace that spoke such perfect BBC English if it weren't for the Russian surname you'd think he was born in the UK. He admitted that he started to learn English at age six using materials provided by the BBC English language programme, and if it weren't for the breakup of the Soviet Union would likely have pursued a career in the Soviet diplomatic corps or as an English-to-Russian translator.

[Dr. Sivana]

Whether Brooklyn or The Bronx, New Yorkese is all the same accent.

Not true. I have nailed Bronx vs. Queens/Brooklyn many times. I can't describe the diphthongs in question, I can just tell.

[alexander_busek]

That’s not the only accent gone. Listen to any news broadcast from the 60s. Then to one from the 30s. Then a current one. All 3 are very different.

While accents do shift, part of what you are hearing may be due to the simple fact that audiences have gotten geographically larger, so that regional accents - which would be noticed by segments of the audience - gradually came to be seen as a drawback.

Further, there is another separate but similar phenomenon: the style of speaking. Radio news readers (if that's the correct term) in the 1930s had a nasal quality; perhaps it came through more clearly over the crackly ether. In the 1940s and 50s, a strident delivery and a youthful, all-American tone of voice were prefered. In the 1960s and 70s, after t.v. acquired widespread popularity, deeper-voiced, almost grandfatherly newscasters predominated. These are merely fads.

Regards,

[holden]

But of course, certainly not as a KGB spy among Brits or Americans. /sarc

HF

[SWAMPSNIPER]

No matter how they talk they still waddle like ducks!

[Dudoight]

I was just talking w/ a friend yesterday about how the Texas accent was evaporating. Contrast Gov Perry w/ former LBJ.

I hate to see these regional speech traits and manner of expression die out.

[RayChuang88]

He told me that he had actually considered going into the KGB but dropped the idea when he thought privately some of the people in the KGB were just a tad too "creepy." But doing diplomatic work or working for Gosplan (the Soviet economic planning agency) translating English newspapers to Russian was something he was considering at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union.

[raybbr]

That’s not the only accent gone. Listen to any news broadcast from the 60s. Then to one from the 30s. Then a current one. All 3 are very different.

Listen to Looney Tunes cartoons. All the characters sound like they are from Brooklyn.

I can say that I will not miss the accent. Used to work with a bunch of people from NY. "Hey, let me ax you sumpin. How would you like to eat a sqwirrel sangwich?"

[july4thfreedomfoundation]

I’m not buying it.

A New York accent and a Brooklyn accent are two different things.

My 83 year-old uncle lives in Florida. He grew up in Brooklyn, and in his younger days he had a Brooklyn accent.....now he has a classic New York accent, the accent heard in Manhattan and some of the other burroughs, as well as Long Island. I myself grew up on Long Island, and I’ve been told I still have traces of a New York accent, even though I haven’t lived in the New York area since 1974.

Years ago, New Yorkers who had the classic Brooklyn accent pronounced “oil” as “earl” and Thirty-Third Street would be pronounced as “totie-turd” street. That classic Brooklyn accent may be disappearing, but the other New York accent is alive and well. I have a number of relatives on Long Island and most of them have thick New York accents.....accents so thick you could them with a knife.

I live in Maine now and I can always tell when someone visiting here in the summer is from New York, although some New Yorkers have more obvious accents than others. There is also such as thing as a Maine accent, although I’ll have to say it’s more prevalent among elderly and middle-aged Mainers than the teenagers....I think they pick it up as they grow older. Also, a Boston accent is different than a Maine accent.

Then there’s regional sayings....in Maine, if you ask directions of a local, someone might say. “You can’t get there from here.” If you were not born in Maine, you are said to be “from away.”

Also, if a New Yorker trips while walking down the street carrying a bag of groceries, he might say, “Son of a bitch!”

In Maine, (and Massachusetts), he would yell, “Son of a whore!” LOL!

[libertarian27]

The Boston accent is starting to fade too.

In the New movie ‘Edge of Darkness’, set in Boston and other MA towns, Mel Gibson and other characters throw the accent around in various scenes, but not all. It’s a mish-mosh of dialects that people from Taxachusetts will hear as strange.

There’s a few scenes set in Northampton with a character that just drips a Boston accent - you don’t hear that in Northampton at all, the accent is very out of place. The town is @ 90 miles west of Boston and accents don’t travel that far in MA anymore.

[Vaquero]

fugetaboutit.....

the increase of foreign nationals from all over the world will surely modify newyawkese....

most of the purveyors of various ‘traditional’ NY dialects have moved to the ‘suboibs’ and much of them have morphed into a more correct usage over the past few generations....

Me? I put my accent on or take it off as needed....mostly for my own amusement.

but I have to be careful kidding around with turlit and earl for the car....at least outside the house....so as not to sound like a total guido.

BTW....ever notice how a segment of the folks from NawOrlins have that NY twang???

My favorite NY accent was Daniel Day Lewis in ‘Gangs of NY’ with his ancient NewYawkeze....

[livius]

I think the point is that regional accents are disappearing among the younger generation, not among people who grew up with them. I travel a fair amount to different parts of the country and I have noticed this to be the case everywhere, not just in New York.

Interestingly, I go to Spain a lot, and I have noticed that the extreme regional accents are also being modified there and that more and more young people speak a sort of “standard Castillian” that they have obviously absorbed from TV. So it’s a generalized phenomenon worldwide, I suspect.

[Dilbert56]

I dated a girl fwom Bwooklyn. She used to panounce her “arhs” where there were no “arhs” and add an “r” to words ending in “a”.

[Paladin2]

"Will old Noo Yawk become a museum piece..?"

Hopefully, as I find it annoying.

[raccoonradio]

I’ve got a baseball related CD box set and there’s one bit from radio (40s? 50s?) where they talk to Brooklyn Dodger fans and the accents are interesting, etc.

Didn’t the NY accent kind of spread to Rhode Island? Dorg,
corfee...

I am in Boston and do have more that a bit of a Boston accent. When I travel I point out that, no, Bostonians do not, er, uh, necessarily uh sound like the, uh, Kennedys.

Boston: BAW-stin
Vermont: Ver-MAWnt (a Vermonter would say “Ver-MAHHnt”)
Gloucester: GLOSS-tah
Worcester: WISS-tah
Medford: MED-fidd (no, not “Meffa”, at least not for me)
Woburn: WOO-burn (I don’t know why)
Peabody: PEA-bih-dee

Obviously my pronunciation of car or bar gives me away.

[raccoonradio]

Brooklyn’s Bernie Goldberg (at least I think he’s from there) has joked on air about pronunciations like 33rd street as
“Tirty Tird street”