When Ron Aldridge left the South Bronx for an Ohio university in the 1960s, it was like going to a foreign county. The way he talked caused so many misunderstandings that at times he wondered, “Am I not speaking English?” Frustrated, he went to student services, who helped him find a speech coach. They worked on his accent — pronouncing the “r” at the end of “father,” slowing down his speech rate, smoothing out the vowels in words like “ask” and “dog.” After toning down his accent, things got better in Ohio.
Ron’s story of loss and gain — of losing his New York accent and gaining some social currency — repeats itself often across the city today. Current linguistic research finds that many of the defining features of local speech are losing ground.
Which begs the question: Are we saying fuhgeddaboudit to the New York accent?
There are obvious reasons why that would be happening, of course. Research shows that not all accents are created equal in the US — when Americans are asked to rank locations in descending order from most to least “correct” speech, the New York City accent is rated second to last (only the South rates lower). Speakers of the New York City accent, it turns out, are associated with a number of negative attributes, like being unfriendly and unkind. What’s more, it’s not just non-New Yorkers who hold these views. New Yorkers themselves provide negative ratings of their own accent, a finding that caused prominent linguist William Labov in the 1960s to coin the term “linguistic insecurity.”
We see stigmatization not just in linguistic research but in portrayals of the accent in the media, where New York City accents are used by criminals or mobsters (“The Godfather”), comedians (“My Cousin Vinny,” “The Nanny”) and generally negative or unsavory characters (Archie Bunker in “All in the Family”).
But it wasn’t always this way. Linguists mark World War II as the turning point for the New York City accent. Before, the accent was prestigious, as was the dialect that has primarily influenced it, British English. After the war, we saw something of a flip and the beginnings of a growing stigma.
The effect of that stigma can be seen most clearly when charting the change for the New York City accent’s most defining consonant — r — which can remain unpronounced at the end of a word (cah for car) or at the end of a syllable (pahty for party) but never at the beginning of either (we always pronounce our r’s in red and story). Since the flip in prestige, New Yorkers have been slowly changing to pronounce more and more of their r’s.
This kind of change is termed a change from above, because it’s both a conscious change (New Yorkers will tell you they should pronounce their r’s) and one in reaction to an outside, broadly American, notion of what’s correct. In short, pronouncing r’s appears to be a direct reaction to the stigma attached to sounding like a New Yorker. Today, many speakers are still variable (sometimes they say cah, sometimes car), but the expectation is that this change will complete at some point in the future.
Another feature that is changing is the vowel in words like coffee or dog, pronounced cawfee or dawg (what linguists would call a raised and lengthened vowel). A sampling of speakers of European descent from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, for instance, found big differences across age groups, so that older speakers had the classic cawfee, while younger speakers were simply not producing this raised version.
This is just what is found for r, as well as for other features of the accent that have been almost completely lost, like the pronunciation of “er” as “oi” in words like bird.
It seems easy, given the findings that these classic features of the New York City accent are fading, to predict the end of cawfee talk, or at least its eminent demise. Yet there are a few points to consider before we put the final nail in the New York City accent’s coffin.
The first is a general point about accents, and language more generally, which is that they change and always will change. It’s a linguistic fact of life. The relationship between local identity and language use is a strong one and suggests that even if we all start pronouncing our r’s, we’ll find something else to make us uniquely New York. We still wait “on line” for instance, not “in line,” as most of the rest of the country.
What’s more, contemporary research on accents in the US considers a broader range of speakers when sampling a dialect region than was done in the past. One hundred years ago, when describing an accent, we looked to the NORMs — the non-mobile, older, rural males. Now we look to cities, to youth, to females, and to speakers of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds to describe an accent like New York City’s. On the Lower East Side, while speakers of European descent are losing “r” and “cawfee,” speakers of other ethnic backgrounds, including African Americans and Latinos, continue to use these features. This expansion in our research suggests that we don’t yet know the future of the New York City accent in this ever-changing, ever-diversifying city.
As for Ron, his view on the New York City accent has changed. “I absolutely adore where I was raised, and the New York accent — I’ve come to appreciate that.” Even though he’s now lived in Seattle for more than 40 years, he says, “When late evening comes, and I’m talking, that’s when my New York accent will come out.”
Kara Becker is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Reed College. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from New York University, where she studied accents on the Lower East Side.