The first thing theatergoers will notice about the revival of “A View of the Bridge,” Arthur Miller’s 1950s drama about a working-class Italian-American family in Red Hook, is that the characters are speaking a different language: Brooklynese. You got a problem with that!?
You can hear the mellifluous — some might say grating — dialect being celebrated on Broadway by Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. But that may be the only place. Linguists say features of the classic accent are heard less and less in the city itself, especially among the younger generation. Mocked and stereotyped, the long o’s and w’s have fallen out of favor, unless you’re auditioning for a mob film.
Will old Noo Yawk become a museum piece, the subway token of language?
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First, a lesson in rhoticity. What, exactly, is the New York accent? One key component, linguists say, is the “R.” Not only do New Yorkers drop Rs (call the doctah!), they add them in where they’re not needed, usually when the next word starts with a vowel, which creates “I sawr it with my very own eyes!” and “The sofer in the living room is green.” It all started across the pond. The New York accent, with its dropped Rs, is “absolutely from British English,” says Kara Becker, a Ph.D. student at NYU who is writing her dissertation on New York City English. Londoners began to drop Rs around the end of the 1600s, according to Michael Newman, associate professor of lingusitics at Queens College.
The East Coast is referred to as the “R-less corridor” by linguists, and other coastal cities have accents with features in common with New York, like Boston and Charleston, S.C. Those cities “were settled around the same time, and the speakers came from a certain place” — South London — “using a certain type of British English,” Becker says.
Stephen Gabis, the dialect coach for “A View From the Bridge,” says New York speech gradually got “a little slower, a bit lazier, and the muscularity was relaxed,” becoming less stiff and leaning toward the heavier “ga’head” (translation: “go ahead”).
Up until 1945, it was considered distinguished to drop your Rs. Think of FDR, on his radio addresses: “We have nothing to feee-ah but fe-ah istelf.” After World War II, “Americans stopped considering British English to be quite so prestigious,” says Becker. “Broadcaster English” became the new desired norm.
Then there’s the curious case of the New York Honk, which Tom Wolfe wrote about in 1976. The Honk was a certain upper-class East Coast accent that persisted after WWII, spoken by wealthy prep-school types such as Bobby Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller. Wolf called it “derived in the natural Anglophile bias of Eastern social life.” The unique way that New Yorkers draw out their vowels is another important feature of the dialect. Raising the vowels is one of the first exercises Gabis does with actors learning the accent.
New York-style vowels are diphthongs — meaning they change into another sound during pronunciation. That’s just a boring way to describe the musical “aww-uhh” that New Yorkers bring to their vowels, pulling them apart like taffy, turning “sausage” into “sawww-sage.” Words like “talk” and “walk” turn into two-syllable words: “Taww-uhk” and “waww-uuhk.” Travis Bickle’s famous line from “Taxi Driver” actually sounds more like, “Yoo tawwhkin’ ta may?”
Where do these diphthongs come from? There’s no obvious answer. They’ve popped up since the 1600s in both England and America, perhaps just local dialects that developed independently.
More apparent is the lineage of “dese” and “dose.” The only immigrant language that had the “th” sound in it was Greek, meaning all the other travellers to the New World had a hard time pronouncing the sound — in other words, they had trouble wid it.
And the rest of the country pronounces a word like “singer” as “seeeng-er,” with a soft “g.” But in the New York dialect, it’s “SING-er.” That pronounced ‘g’ is a vestige of Yiddish and Italian.
Nobody’s quite sure when these features melded into the accent we know today, though it shows up on some of the earliest sound recordings. After the British, the next generation of European immigrants to New York City — Irish and Germans in the mid-1800s, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Italians starting in the 1880s — contributed their own features. There were references to a “Bowery accent” by the turn of the century.
How and why dialects change is mysterious, influenced by a constellation of factors, and not even linguists can say for sure how it works. “Once you leave them alone, they just develop and change, like Latin became Italian, French and Portugese. [A dialect] develops its own peculiarities,” says George Jochnowitz, retired Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the College of Staten Island.
But that old story that you could tell by someone’s accent the street they grew up on is an urban myth. Whether Brooklyn or The Bronx, New Yorkese is all the same accent.
“What people think of as borough differences are actually socioeconomic differences, like education, income level and occupation,” Newman says. “No one has ever shown any geographical difference between any of the regions in the city.”
“It’s borough pride [in thinking] they talk differently from the rest,” Gabis adds. Born in Brooklyn of Irish and Lithuanian descent, the accents in the play were inspired by the voices he grew up around: “It sounded like a Scorsese movie.”
There are, however, slight ethnic differences between accents. The Carbone family in Miller’s play is Italian-American, and “the Italian version [of the New York accent] is so musical,” Gabis says, noting that their unique cadence is consistent with Italian. “The accents migrated, and a couple generations later, the music is still there.” Think of the up-and-down inflections of Joe Pesci in “Raging Bull”: “Fuggedaboutit, I ain’t doin’ it, I ain’t hittin’ ya!”
Then there’s the Irish version, “the Jimmy Cagney way of speaking — real machine gun, like your mouth is a weapon,” Gabis says. “You doity rat!“
Neighborhood homogeneity plays a part in developing an accent, which happens between the ages 8 and 14. “Back then, it was the purity of that neighborhood, so you spoke like the people in your little world,” said Jessica Hecht, the Connecticut-born actress who plays Beatrice in “Bridge.” “You didn’t have any other influence.”
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Population change is one major factor of the New York accent’s decline, as the mixing of different people tends to neutralize accents. Why exactly hasn’t been figured out by linguists: “There’s a huge argument in the field as to whether it’s changed by contact with other people or by self-identity,” Newman says.
In other words, do kids neglect to pick up the accent that their parents have because not as many people around them have it — or in the self-identity argument, do they become self-conscious about the accent and not want to talk like their parents and grandparents?
Much will be learned from Kara Becker’s field site — the blocks where she studies and records denizens’ speech — on the Lower East Side. It is the same area that the “godfather of sociolinguistics” William Labov studied when he created “The Atlas of American English” in 1966.
The area had not been examined by linguists since, and Becker has spent the last two years recording and analyzing the speech patterns of 64 people. What she found: Young people native to the neighborhood aren’t developing the accent Labov heard.
“On the Lower East Side in particular, the people we would expect to maintain the New York accent — those of European ancestry, Italian, Irish — the young folks of those enthnicities are not using the New York features,” Becker says. “Older speakers [still] have the classic accent, among white people.”
Becker’s group is contained within the Lower East Side, which has seen a huge population shift during its gentrification of the last 20 years. But in general, “New Yorkers are more and more ‘R’-ful, and the amount of R-dropping is decreasing,” Newman says. “We don’t really know why.”
“In Manhattan [the accent] is definitely dying,” Jochnowitz says. Manhattan has also seen the most influx of new people from outside the state, who don’t usually pick up an accent. The dialect “remains mostly in the outer boroughs, and is most alive in Staten Island.”
Staten Island is a known stronghold of New York talk not only because it has the most stable New York population, but because “anywhere you have lots of white people — Jews and Italians and Irish and Germans — whose origins are in the city, you’re going to find that accent pretty systematically,” Newman says. Its relative isolation may have also helped.
As the accent is dying in some places, it’s migrated to others. New Yorkers have brought their accents with them to Long Island — also known as Lawn Guyland — or New Joisey (hello, cast of “Jersey Shore”!)
Although George Bernard Shaw thought the New York dialect was the most beautiful sound in the world — “the ultimate in sophistication in human speech” — not everyone is in love with the accent, mostly because it signifies working-class origins. To graduate from Queens College in the 1960s, students had to pass a speech test — and you would do well to pronounce your Rs.
Because of the accent’s humbler origins, generations of parents hoping their children would grow up to be doctors or lawyers and get out of “the neighborhood” encouraged their children to leave it behind, deeming is lower class, ethnic or crude.
Some parts of the accent have simply gone extinct already for that very reason. No one asks to meet you on the corner of “Thoity Thoid and Thoid Street” anymore, or declares that “the oily boid gets the woim” — that particular feature has been gone for “50, 60, 70 years,” Jochnowitz says. It was “laughed out of the dialect” — stigmatized so much that people were shamed into cutting it out.
The same thing is happening now to the “yuhs guys” and “sawr it.”
“If people try to lose [their accent], they’re more likely to lose it if they feel they’re not going to get ahead in life with it,” Jochnowitz adds, although he mentioned that a good number of educated people hang on to their accents, though sometimes a bit self-consciously. Ed Koch, himself an unrepetent R-dropper, once went so far as to say he wouldn’t mourn Brooklynese if it disappeared.
Despite the unfair class bias, there are just as many who see the talk as an integral part of the city’s identity. “I’m very saddened by the idea of losing [their accent] permanently,” Gabis says. “I never met an accent I didn’t like.”
While it’s true that the younger generation has moved away from New York dialect, that “doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of people embracing and using the accent, because they have strong associations and pride about being New Yorkers,” Becker says. “The short answer is no, it’s not dying, it’s changing.”
There’s something to be said for the dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, for whom Brooklyn or Queens is an attitude, not a place.
“Language is meant to shift around,” Gabis says. “I think it’s alive and well, depending on the neighborhoods you go to.” But you might have to look — and listen — a little harder for it.
Freelance writer Sheila McClear’s book, “The Last of the Live Nude Girls” (Soft Skull), will be published next year.