Oily Woims Are Disappearing
Why the classic Noo Yawk accent is fading away
"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."
This piece from the NY Post is an interesting read to me because I was born in NYC and grew up on Long Island. But it contains some false statements like this:
"But that old story that you could tell by someone's accent the street they grew up on is an urban myth. Whether Brooklyn or The Bronx, New Yorkese is all the same accent."
Now I haven't lived there for a long time, and accents do change and mutate and I suppose start to fade, but when I lived there it was easy to tell if someone was from Brooklyn, the Island, Jersey and especially from upstate, which started just a few miles north out of the city. As you went that way people started sounding more like New Englanders. (Paack the caa in Haarvad Yaad) If you turned left to Rochester and Buffalo the speech patterns changed again, more like a Chicago clip.
Another thing I had issues with in this essay was the insistence that a large percentage of people change how they talk in a conscious way, for social reasons. I think that would be an insignificant reason why, in the overall scheme of things, a regional dialect would mutate or fade. This idea must come from the viewpoint of people self conscious about how others percieve them. A trait most assuredly not overly found in New Yorkers.
The overriding reason we talk the way we do is because we gradually sound like the people around us. Probably the New York accents are less strong because people move around more and speechisms are more diluted. I have a good ear for minor inflections and can still pick out people from that part of the country even if they haven't been there for a while. Gimme a couple beeyas and I'll give myself away too.
"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."
This piece from the NY Post is an interesting read to me because I was born in NYC and grew up on Long Island. But it contains some false statements like this:
"But that old story that you could tell by someone's accent the street they grew up on is an urban myth. Whether Brooklyn or The Bronx, New Yorkese is all the same accent."
Now I haven't lived there for a long time, and accents do change and mutate and I suppose start to fade, but when I lived there it was easy to tell if someone was from Brooklyn, the Island, Jersey and especially from upstate, which started just a few miles north out of the city. As you went that way people started sounding more like New Englanders. (Paack the caa in Haarvad Yaad) If you turned left to Rochester and Buffalo the speech patterns changed again, more like a Chicago clip.
Another thing I had issues with in this essay was the insistence that a large percentage of people change how they talk in a conscious way, for social reasons. I think that would be an insignificant reason why, in the overall scheme of things, a regional dialect would mutate or fade. This idea must come from the viewpoint of people self conscious about how others percieve them. A trait most assuredly not overly found in New Yorkers.
The overriding reason we talk the way we do is because we gradually sound like the people around us. Probably the New York accents are less strong because people move around more and speechisms are more diluted. I have a good ear for minor inflections and can still pick out people from that part of the country even if they haven't been there for a while. Gimme a couple beeyas and I'll give myself away too.
posted by nolocontendere at 8:59 PM
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