New York City English

Michael Newman

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781501508899
• eBook ISBN: 9781501500602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

New York City English is one of the most recognizable of US dialects, and research on it launched modern sociolinguistics. Yet the city's speech has never before received a comprehensive description and analysis. In this book, Michael Newman examines the differences and similarities among the ways English is spoken by the extraordinarily diverse population living in the NY dialect region. He uses data from a variety of sources including older dialectological accounts, classic and recent variationist studies, and original research on speakers from around the dialect region. All levels of language are explored including phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and discourse along with a history of English in the region. But this book provides far more than a dialectological and historical inventory of linguistic features. The forms used by different groups of New Yorkers are discussed in terms of their complex social meanings. Furthermore, Newman illustrates the varied forms of sociolinguistic significance with examples from the personal experiences of a variety of New Yorkers and includes links to sound files on the publisher's site and videos on YouTube. The result is a rigorous but accessible and compelling account of the English spoken in this great city.

1 Introduction

1.1 New York City English and the approach taken in this book

A half-century ago, in what became the foundational text in the emerging field of variationist sociolinguistics and the best known examination of New York City English (NYCE), Bill Labov (1966/2006: 18) wrote the following:

It is safe to say that the language of New York City is better known to the people of the United States as whole than the language of any other single city.… On radio and television, stereotypes of middle class and working class New York speech have traditionally been used for comic effects. For many years several other features of working class and lower class New York City speech have been stigmatized under the label of Brooklynese.

Labov’s study is called The Social Stratification of English in New York City (hereafter SSENYC).¹ The title reflects his then novel findings that dialectal variation was far from chaotic but was systematically organized by social factors, in this case exponents of socioeconomic stratification.

Take non-rhoticity or r-lessness – two terms meaning lack of a consonantal /r/ after vowels – as in words like four and fourth. Although stereotypical New Yorkers might be thought of as dropping their /r/s consistently, Labov notes that there is usually variation. As such, he describes this trait as a variable, which he labeled (r) – with (r-1) as the pronounced or r-ful variant and (r-0) the r-less one. Labov also examined two other characteristically NYCE variables – also indicated in parentheses – in detail:

• – (oh) the vowel in thought,
• – (aeh) the vowel in bath,

Finally, he analyzed two pronunciations associated with a vernacular versus standard distinction not only in New York but in many other English dialects as well:

• – (dh) the initial sound of this, and
• – (th) the initial sound of think.

New Yorkers treat the three more characteristically New York variables in similar ways to the more widespread (dh) and (th). The higher their socioeconomic status (SES) and – holding SES constant – the more attention they pay to their speech –the less frequently they use the locally marked variants in each case. This rejection of local pronunciations is so strong that Labov asserts that “the term linguistic self-hatred is not too extreme to apply to the situation” (SSENYC: 329–330).

Bonfiglio (2002) observed that this reaction is surprising. Inhabitants of comparable cultural capitals – say London, Paris, Mexico City, Tokyo or even Los Angeles – do not systematically try to sound like they are from elsewhere. It is the inhabitants of their respective hinterlands that are embarrassed about their speech. Bonfiglio traces the different behavior of New Yorkers to the racialization of late 19^th and early 20^th Century immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, who were heavily concentrated in the city. Although we now mostly think of people of these origins as White, at the time their Whiteness was highly questioned. Since Whiteness is to a large extent conflated with American identity, even the immigrants’ children were considered at best only partly American. Their English, although native, Bonfiglio claims, was consequently felt to be out of the mainstream and funny, if not just bad.

Although the construction of Whiteness in America has become more inclusive and racism less overt generally, Niedzielski and Preston (2003) find that NYCE still only compares with southern varieties in provoking dislike among Americans. Moreover, NYCE continues to draw interest and attention as somehow quirky as best. A 2008 movie by Heather Quinlan called If These Knishes Could Talk (http://newyorkaccentfilm.com) documents NYCE and its relationship to the city’s culture. It is hard to imagine such a film about any other urban US speech variety. New media – which allows us to easily gauge interest in contemporary popular culture quantitatively – tells the same story. The search term “New York accent” on YouTube yielded more about 12,900 results in July 2013.² Contrast that with a mere 1,960 for “Chicago accent,” 1,911 for any of “Los Angeles accent,” “LA accent,” “SoCal accent,” and “California accent.”³

The reference to knishes (pastries containing potato or other savory fillings of Eastern European origin) in the title of Quinlan’s movie provides a culinary connection between NYCE and Eastern European Jews as presumably the most archetypical speakers. Nevertheless, Jews are not the only group represented in the film, and so-called Brooklynese is more properly associated generally with the ethnic Whites who dominated the city demographically from the late 19^th Century to the 1970s. Since then, a more recent wave of immigrants from all over the world has altered the population of the city and, to a lesser extent, the surrounding area. Now well over a majority of New Yorkers are either immigrants or children of immigrants (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, & Holdaway 2008). The 2011 US Census American Community Survey, for example, reports that for 49.1 % a language other than English is spoken at home. The characteristics of recent immigration have also led the city to become far more racially diverse than at any time in its history. Although “Brooklynese” may remain the most iconic form of NYCE, the ways New Yorkers actually speak English has multiplied with this diversity. Therefore, it is necessary to define NYCE plurally; any form of English distinctive of any of the many New York identities counts and so is fodder for the descriptions that follow in this book.

The focus of the book is primarily descriptive, to give an account of the story of NYCE including geography and demographics in Chapter 2, and phonology, morphosyntax, discourse, lexicon, and history respectively in Chapters 3 to 7. Nevertheless, the stigma of NYCE and the racial and ethnic diversity of the city –even in its less extreme state half a century ago – have played an important role in the progress of sociolinguistics itself. This is the case not only for Labov’s original theoretical insights in SSENYC but also important advances by interactional sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, whose work is discussed in Chapter 5. So developments in sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theory form part of the story of NYCE too.

Moreover, there is no such thing as atheoretic description, which makes it hard to avoid addressing a current challenge to the variationist paradigm. This dispute arises from the work of Vertovec (2007), who argues that contemporary post-industrial urban areas are characterized by a “diversity of diversity.” This so-called superdiversity involves destabilization of social categories like gender, class, subcultures and forms of communication in addition to ethnic and racial groups that variationists have traditionally relied upon in analyses. Blommaert (2010) claims that variationists’ use of those macrosocial categories and their focus on linguistic structures consequently provide only superficial accounts of the sociolinguistic reality in superdiverse societies. Perhaps the changes that characterize New York at the beginning of the 21^st Century spell the limits of the approach Labov developed in the middle of the 20^th. The discussions in the following chapters of can be read as implicit responses to such claims, and the question itself is addressed briefly in the conclusion.

1.2 The data used

Dialectologists – who describe and analyze dialects in mostly geographical terms – began systematic studies of NYCE with a short but remarkable work by Babbitt (1896) followed by a number of studies of varying quality and importance discussed in Chapter 7. Although Labov has never claimed to have superseded the dialectological framework so much as complemented it (e.g., Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006), SSENYC marks a break from that approach. That book is less concerned with characterizing NYCE comprehensively – as a dialectologist would do – than systematically connecting variation with social factors. Therefore, the dialectologists’ work provides a wider range of NYCE features, but those examined by Labov, such as the five variables mentioned above along with a few others, have been studied more in depth in particular with respect to their social and linguistic roles.

SSENYC was largely derived from fieldwork on the Lower East Side (LES) of Manhattan and focused mainly on White speakers although data from African Americans were collected and included in some analyses. Later Labov, working with some collaborators, examined the English spoken by Black and a few Puerto Rican youths in Harlem (Labov, et al. 1968 a, b). These studies along with a number of follow-ups in which Labov reexamined the original LES and Harlem recordings appear over and over again in this book.

Unfortunately for the study of NYCE, Labov left for the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, and local universities were slow to pick up the slack, although important work in interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology appeared from time to time. The most well-known of the interactional studies are Tannen’s (1981) inauguration of research on conversational style and Urciuoli (1996) and Zentella’s (1999) examinations of bilingualism and identity. Yet apart from Wolfram’s (1974) important account of Puerto Rican English, hardly any variationist research on NYCE appeared for over 25 years. Variationist research resumed with a major expansion in the New York University Linguistics Department beginning in the 1990s. The first research in this line is Cutler’s (1999/2003) examination of AAE variants and identity among White youth associated with Hip-Hop, which although largely interactional was ...

Table of contents

• Dialects of English
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Geography demography and cultural factors
• 3 Phonetics and Phonology
• 4 Morphology and Syntax
• 5 Discourse Factors
• 6 Lexicon
• 7 The History and Study of NYCE
• 8 Conclusion
• 9 Appendix A: Short Biographical Descriptions of the BQ-16
• 10 Appendix B: Transcriptions of NYCE Speakers
• References
• Index