Photo courtesy of Wooster School
Updated June 2024. Adapted and expanded from an article originally published 8 March 2024.
Performances set in New York City, like the recent production of Guys and Dolls at the school where I work, give actors the opportunity to lean full-tilt, often with comedic effect, into some classic New York accents. This nationally recognized accent is one with a long and storied history. What are its particular features, and where is it headed, according to recent linguistic research?
A word of caution before we begin a closer look. As with any regional dialect, there is not so much the one singular New York accent as there are really thousands or millions of New York accents, which we can average together to identify general patterns. In reality, narrower social factors like one's ancestry, socioeconomic status, gender, peer group, etc. helps determine the specifics of how people speak in the Big Apple.
When we talk broadly about a New York accent, we mean a way of speaking native to the City’s metropolitan area, including northeastern New Jersey, much of Long Island, and some of nearby Westchester County and the Hudson Valley (Newman 17-18). Nowadays, the accent is mostly tied to metropolitan New York locals of Italian, Jewish, German, and Irish heritage (Guy 532, Newman 22, 142), best associated with the working and middle classes (Castronovo 4). Wealthier New Yorkers have resisted fully conforming to the accent for many, many decades now, as do younger New Yorkers. Furthermore, particular ethnic groups have developed some flavor of their own, while the rest of New York State (what we often call "Upstate") comprises a whole separate dialect region (Dinkin 387, 430).
For a majority of my students, raised in a Connecticut–New York area just an hour’s drive north of the City, "nod" and "gnawed" sound exactly the same: they are homophones, as with many (perhaps even most) younger Americans nationwide. However, in traditional New York metro style, an entire extra vowel sound exists, which gives "nod" and "gnawed" distinct pronunciations (Newman 62, Haddican et al. 12). The vowel in "nod" has relaxed lips and an open jaw—a vowel that is natural for most Americans—but the vowel in "gnawed" is articulated with a higher tongue and tightly rounded lips. Similarly, this separates "stock" from "stalk," "pond" from "pawned," and "tot" from "taught." The special New York "aw" sound, commonly joked about and stereotyped in movies and television, is also found in words like "law, saw, sauce, caught, thought, lost, dog, coffee, all, salt," etc.
How do you say the word "map"? If you are an American, you probably say the "A" with your tongue flat and jaw dropped fairly low. However, in the word "man," you probably say the "A" with the tongue higher and your mouth less open, which almost becomes "may + in" rapidly spoken together. For ease, we can call the first variant "low" and the second one "high." In New York City, these low and high "A"s are distributed across words according to rules that are wildly complex yet fairly consistent. For example, words like "at, back, gap, pal, tax" tend to have the lower articulation, while "ask, bath, gas, pan, tag" tend to have the higher one (Wells 477). In these instances, the consonant following the "A" decides how the "A" ends up enunciated. Even more thorny, the type of syllable an "A" sits inside influences how it is uttered. Thus the following pairs are distinguished with a higher "A" versus a lower "A": "cash" versus "cashew," "ham" versus "hammer," "Sam" versus "salmon," and "man" versus "manic" (Newman 53-6). Many exceptions to these basic patterns exist as well. To think that New Yorkers learn and reproduce all this complexity without ever consciously realizing it!
Say the words "are" and "oar." Which one is hiding inside how you pronounce the word "horror"? Most Americans would answer "oar," but New Yorkers, like some other East Coast Americans, answer "are." That same sound appears in a whole set of words: "historic, Florida, forest, orange, majority, moral," etc. To put it another way: the middle syllable of "historic" sounds like "star" in the Big City (Wells 476).
Words that begin with "hyoo" simplify to "yoo" in conventional New York speech (Castronovo 8). "Huge" becomes "yooge," "humor" becomes "yoomer," "humanities" becomes "yoomanities," and the name "Hugh" (or the word "hue") sounds just like "you."
A few extra vowel sounds are possible in the largest American city before "R" that are non-existent (and often unpronounceable) for most other Americans. For instance, the vowel in “hurry” has a lower tongue than what most other Americans produce: the same vowel as in “hut” or “hug” (Wells 480). There are also differences in saying "tearable" versus "terrible" or "fairy" versus "ferry." The name "Aaron" is not the same as "Erin," and "carrot" not quite the same as "care it." Meanwhile, non-New Yorkers tend to pronounce all these pairs of words the same nationwide! In fact, a three-way distinction can exist in the metro area, where a name like "Mary" has a vowel with a high tongue position, the word "merry" with a lower tongue position, and finally "marry" with an even lower position (Labov et al. 54, 56).
A variety of other characteristics can help define New York accents, particularly those of the 20th century. "Th" can be unique, with "this," "that," and "thin" possibly a bit more like "diss," "dat," and "tin," respectively: the flat front part of the tongue nearing or touching the top teeth (Wells 515-6).
"R" is famously dropped after vowels, with "parking guards" sounding like "pocking gods" or "spar" sounding like "spa." Similarly, too, "farmer" can potentially rhyme with "comma" (itself potentially identical to "karma"). New Yorkers may still do this "R" dropping to varying levels today, though it is becoming rarer (Wells 504-6).
Another notorious sound of early 20th-century New Yorkese (but now basically extinct) is the "urrr" sound of "earth, girl, turn, word," etc (Wells 508-9). Back then, the "R" was dropped here, plus the tongue glided in an upward direction (Guy 524). A common humorous spelling is that "New Jersey" was something like "New Joizy." An even better approximation though is that "flirting with poetic verse" sounded more like how many of us northern Americans say "flighting with poetic vice."
Linguists are typically skeptical of the popular claim that Americans, and even just New Yorkers themselves, can distinguish accents between the City's five boroughs or other neighboring regions (Wells 502). At least one study gives direct evidence that people cannot differentiate the boroughs in this way (Becker and Newlin-Lukowicz 14). Listeners often judge that any native of the City who speaks with fewer of its traditional features is from Manhattan and with more of them is from the other four boroughs. Still, the study showed, this is a common perception but not a reality (Becker and Newlin-Lukowicz 15-7).
21st-century research confirms that Black and some Hispanic New Yorkers are robustly maintaining the local "aw" vowel and "R" dropping (much more so than White New Yorkers), yet they do not particularly participate in New York's low and high "A" split (Blake et al. 284, 287, Slomanson and Newman 250). Both groups may also change "th" to "f" at the end of a syllable, with "myth" exactly like "miff," and enunciate the "eye" vowel (in words like "bye, try, prize, find, wild") without a glide, meaning that "my guide is on time" sounds closer to "ma god is on Tom" (Blake et al. 284, Slomanson and Newman 205). Hispanic New Yorkers may exhibit other quirks too, like a more Spanish-style “L” with the tongue farther forward (Slomanson and Newman). Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers have their own linguistic markers, like a low “A” across-the-board (no high “A”s at all!), which, strangely enough, seems to be a reaction against the normal New York “A” split system deployed by their fellow Jewish and White New Yorkers (Benor 259). Moreover, Orthodox Jews are more likely to produce a “T” at the end of a word with a burst of air (Benor 260).
The New York City area has had a noteworthy accent since at least the years directly after the Civil War, in the second half of the 19th century (Newman 138, 142), and it was first formally studied in the 1890s (Newman 144). Some of its features, like the special "th" consonant, probably sprang up in the City as a result of late 19th-century European immigrants, who did not natively speak English, influencing their new working-class community of English-speaking children (Newman 141-2). Other features, like "R" dropping, likely came about earlier, as a trendy imitation of British accents (Labov et al. 47)! Still others, like the "A" split into low and high variants, first recorded from the Civil War era, traces back to gradual sound shifts since British-American colonial English, even before the United States was its own country (Newman 134).
Sadly, New York accents have suffered from negative pressure and ridicule since the middle of the 20th century, a common example being that New York-born actors have long been cast as rude and annoying characters (Castronovo 52), or in foolish or criminal roles (Guy 531). In a similar vein, all of the classic New York dialect characteristics have been disappearing since the mid-20th century, as younger New Yorkers avoid them, usually using less noticeable or more "standard" American speech (Guy 531). Although a speaker’s ethnicity and other social factors undeniably remain at play (Haddican 2, 22), the future of New York English is unclear. Ongoing change is the one certainty, and what we think of as "the New York accent" may not be recognized in the popular consciousness at all in just a few more decades.
Becker, Kara, and Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz. “The Myth of the New York City Borough Accent: Evidence from perception.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 24. No. 2., 2018, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/219379808.pdf.
Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’? A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 99, No. 2, 2009.
Blake, Renée et al. "African American Language in New York City." The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, edited by Sonja Lanehart, Oxford University Press, 2021 (paperback; originally 2015).
Castronovo Jr., Giacomo. "The Social Perception of Three Features of New York City English." CUNY Academic Works, 2018, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2654.
Dinkin, Aaron J. "Dialect Boundaries and Phonological Change in Upstate New York." Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 79, 2009, http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/7.
Guy, Gregory R. "English in New York, 50 Years After." Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos 58.3, 2016, 521-533, https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cel/article/view/8647615.
Haddican, Bill, et al. "Cross-Speaker Covariation across Six Vocalic Changes in New York City English." American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 97.4, 2022, 512-542. https://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/whaddican/CovariationAmSpeech.pdf.
Labov, William, et al. The Atlas of North American English. Mouton de Gruyter, 2006.
Newman, Michael. New York City English. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014.
Slomanson, Peter and Michael Newman. "Peer group identification and variation in New York Latino English laterals". English World-Wide 25:2, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004, qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~mnewman/Site/Selected_Publications_files/slomanson& newman.PUBLISHED.pdf.
Wells, John C. Accents of English 3: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge University Press, 1982.