New York, Philadelphia, and other northern cities: phonology Historical overview

Current dialect patterns often reflect historical trends. Among the forces shaping the American dialect landscape, particular attention is often paid to early settlement history. In the present case, settlement history can shine some light on the current dialect situation, at least on the general patterns if not on the occurrence of particular linguistic features. Some of the broad outlines of that history are sketched here.

During the colonial period, New York and Philadelphia came to represent economic hubs in the “Middle Colonies”. They got their start as English colonies somewhat later than Massachusetts and Virginia. New York was a Dutch possession until 1664, and Pennsylvania was founded in 1680. From the earliest days, emigration to the Middle Colonies attracted a diverse population. This was especially true in Pennsylvania where the Quaker ideals of founder William Penn promoted religious and ethnic tolerance. In the colonial period and into the nineteenth century the most significant immigration, in addition to the British, was from Ireland and Germany. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, New York and Philadelphia (like other American cities) saw increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Immigrants often settled in ethnically segregated neighborhoods such as the Irish neighborhood of Kensington in Philadelphia or New York’s Little Italy. The ethnic character of many of these areas remains evident today, and studies have demonstrated that the sociolinguistic effect of ethnic identity endures as well. Even more sociolinguistically salient is the ethnic diversity contributed by the influx of African Americans from the South and, especially in New York, of Puerto Ricans and other Caribbeans in the twentieth century.

With the exception of Upstate New York, the area of the Inland North was not heavily settled by Americans until after the establishment of the United States. Federal ordinances in 1785 and 1787 set into motion a process which eventually carved the “Northwest Territory” into the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Many of the immigrants to the northern half of this region came from New England. Settlement of the area received a great boost from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 which connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie. The canal served not only to bring settlers from the East to the Inland North, but also to bring grain and other agricultural goods from the Inland North to markets in the East and abroad. In fact, the canal contributed greatly to New York City’s rise to prominence as the business capital of America. Along the Great Lakes, cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, helped in part by foreign immigration as was the case in Philadelphia and New York. Curiously, the urban centers of the Inland North display little regional linguistic variation; the same basic accent features are heard from Buffalo to Milwaukee. By contrast, distinctive dialect features are found in New York and Philadelphia as well as in many of the cities of the Midland region including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. It is possible that the relative uniformity of speech in the Inland North stems from the original settlement, consisting mainly of New Englanders, but it may also be related to the rapid growth of the cities and their economic interdependence which could have promoted a leveling of dialect differences through the spread of a regional standard.

From these brief historical notes, we turn to a description of the accents. We consider first New York City before moving on to Philadelphia, then the Inland North.