NEW YORK

NEW YORK A city and port at the mouth of the Hudson River, in the state of the same name: a major city of the US and of the English-speaking world, and the centre of one of the largest US urban areas. It occupies Manhattan and Staten Island, the western end of Long Island, and part of the adjacent mainland, and its conurbation extends into the states of New Jersey and Connecticut. It typifies the American concept of the meltingpot, having received through Ellis Island many waves of immigrants, especially from Europe and Latin America. Many languages are spoken in the city, which is the centre of a sub-dialect within the general Northern DIALECT area of AMERICAN ENGLISH.

Pronunciation

(1) New York pronunciation has a long, tense, very round vowel in words like caught, and a long, tense, relatively high vowel in words such as cab. (2) Like eastern New England and the American South, it is a non-RHOTIC (non-r-pronouncing) variety and, also like eastern New England and some accents of England (including RP), it has the LINKING r and INTRUSIVE r. When a word ending in r (which would normally not be pronounced) is followed closely by a word beginning with a vowel, the linking r is sounded: gopher is pronounced ‘gopha’, but in The gopher is lost the r is pronounced. By ANALOGY, an intrusive r occurs where it is not etymologically or orthographically justified: sofa rhymes with gopher, but in The sofa/r is lost an r-sound often intrudes. In contrast, the Southern US shares neither the linking nor intrusive r-sounds with the other non-rhotic varieties, indeed often losing an r-sound even between vowels, as in ve'y for very and Ca'olina for Carolina. Non-rhotic pronunciation differs widely in its prestige, depending on where it occurs. In the American South, r-lessness is a universal feature of many areas at all social levels. In New York City, on the other hand, it correlates strongly with class differences and has low prestige. In his investigations, William Labov found that r-pronouncing was more common among the employees of up-market department stores and shops than among those of businesses with merchandise of lower quality and prices. He also found more r-pronouncing in ‘careful’, self-conscious speech than in spontaneous dialogue. There is also an upper-class, old-family New York English, but it has been little studied and its features are not widely known.

Low prestige

New York English has low prestige even among its own speakers. Their reaction, which has been dubbed ‘linguistic self-hatred’, is not typical of many other areas, where the local speech-ways are usually regarded as indicating that the speaker is honest, friendly, sympathetic, intelligent, and reliable. New Yorkers' discomfort with their speech patterns may reflect the low regard the rest of the nation has for those patterns. It is, however, odd that the major city of the nation (its cultural and financial centre) should be low in linguistic prestige. In fact, the STEREOTYPE of New York English is the language of a lower socioeconomic group, as though LONDON English were to identify with COCKNEY usage, without the affectionate respect often accorded to it. See BROOKLYNESE, DIALECT (AMERICA), JEWISH ENGLISH.