The variety 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 with less conspicuous accents; in particular, they use rhotic pronunciations instead of the less presitigious non-rhotic pronunciations. 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.
Generally, the so-called Jersey accent or North Jersey accent spoken in northern New Jersey is somewhat closer to General American than the speech of New Yorkers, but still shares enough features with it that two can be considered together as a single dialect group for sociolinguistic purposes. Most colloquial greetings and expressions used in New York are also said by New Jerseyans and with the same frequency. However, aside from the areas immediately closest to New York, north Jersey speech is free of certain New York City features which are heavily stigmatized: the Jersey accent is usually rhotic and æ-tensing is less pronounced than in New York.
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 present accent of the Jersey Shore is heavily influenced by that of North Jersey, from which it was principally settled. However, prior to the influence of the tourism industry on the area, the situation was different.
It was first a Dutch town, which is still reflected in the Dutch names of some local businesses and streets. The only road to Cape May was from Philadelphia, so Philadelphia English mixed in with the Dutch. And for many many years, it was greatly influenced by Canadian English, because both French Canadian and English Canadian people would visit Cape May year round, which changed the accent somewhat. The Canadian French affected it somewhat. But this is changing due to the fact that many Canadians have stopped coming to Cape May.
The Cape May accent is fading away now; people are moving away from Cape May and businesses are closing. New people are moving in with ordinary northern New Jersey accents. Within years the accent will dissapear.
Pronunciation
See the article International Phonetic Alphabet 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 , not unlike the corresponding vowel in Received Pronunciation; in the most extreme New York accents, it is even higher and possesses an inglide: [ʊə].
- There is a class of words with a historical "short a" vowel, including plan, class, and bad, where the historical [æ] has undergone [æ]-tensing to [eə], or, in the most extreme accents, [ɪə]. 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 vowels before medial [ɹ] than many other modern American accents do:
- the vowels in marry [mæɹi], merry [mɛɹi], and Mary [meəɹi] are distinct.
- the vowels in furry [fɝi] and hurry [hʌɹi] are distinct
- Words like orange and forest are pronounced [ɑɹəndʒ] and [fɑɹəst] with the same stressed vowel as pot, not with the same vowel as port as in much of the rest of the United States.
- The traditional New York–area accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the sound [ɹ] does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no [ɹ] in words like park [pɑːk], butter [bʌɾə], or here [hiə]. This feature is losing ground; 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 [ɜɪ]. 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. Younger New Yorkers (born since about 1950) are likely to use a rhotic [ɝ] in bird even if they use nonrhotic pronunciations of beard, bared, bard, board, boor, and butter.
- Some speakers replace the dental fricatives [θ, ð] with the stops [t, d], so that words like thing and this sound similar to "ting" and "dis". This feature is also becoming less and less frequent.
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