New York City

The speech of New York City holds a special place in American public consciousness. New York together with the South top most Americans’ lists of places with the most recognizable accents. Unfortunately for speakers of these accents, this salience comes from stigmatization. For outsiders, New York speech is often associated with toughness, lack of education, and “street smarts”. This is the stereotype conveyed by the popular label “Brooklynese”, which, in keeping with other cultural stereotypes, situates “true” New York speech outside Manhattan. The label raises the issue of potential differences across the five boroughs of the city. Some locals claim to be able to distinguish a Bronx speaker from a Brooklynite or a Staten Islander. The linguistics literature on New York speech does not recognize any consistent interborough differences though, in truth, the question has not been studied thoroughly. Of course, New York City does not lack for linguistic variation of other types. Indeed, with a socially diverse population of over eight million people, it is clearly a fiction to talk of a New York accent. The discussion of accent features below includes some comments about sociolinguistic variation, but readers are reminded of the earlier caveat about the diversity of accents in a city of this size.