New York-New Jersey English Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

The variation of the English language spoken in the New York City and North Jersey region is often considered to be one of the most recognizable accents within American English.

Table of contents

1 The New York Accent 2 The New Jersey Accent 3 The Sound 4 Related Topics

The New York Accent

Made famous world-wide by countless movies and television programs, the easily recognizable New York accent is spoken by a significant portion of native-born residents of New York City and its immediate vicinity in southeastern New York State. In particular, the city boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens as well as western Long Island are considered to be areas where the accent is most often heard from among the public. In these areas, the countless families that have resided here for several generations are the ones who speak with the accent most strongly.

However, not all residents of this region speak with distinct New York accents. Generally, wealthier New Yorkers who come from educational backgrounds that are higher than average tend to speak without any trace of the accent. Many others though, particularly those of Caucasian descent from the middle-class and working-class, do tend to have varying degrees of what has been coined New Yorkese within their daily regular speech. The accent tends to be most prevalent in more densly populated urban and suburban areas. Usually, the further away one travels from the aformentioned locations, the less frequently the accent is heard.

The New Jersey Accent

Generally, the so-called Jersey Accent or North Jersey Accent spoken in northern New Jersey is simply a softer version of the English language spoken by residents of New York and is very frequently mistaken for a New York accent by people from other parts of the United States. It is sometimes even mistaken by people from the region itself, although most native-born New Jerseyans and New Yorkers can make the distinction when they listen carefully. Most colloquial greetings and expressions used in New York are also said by New Jerseyans and with the same frequency. Usually, however, the New Jersey accent does not blanket all words of speech, as is often the case with New Yorkers, and instead, only select words are pronounced differently from standard American English. Most common examples would be words containing a short a or o sound.

As in New York, the further away one travels from New York City itself, the weaker the accent becomes. The Jersey accent is mostly confined to the northeastern quarter of New Jersey, more or less within twenty-five miles of Manhattan.

Contrary to popular belief, no one in any part of New Jersey ever refers to their state as Joisey. This word is, in fact, a mistaken attempt by non-New Jersey residents to speak with a Jersey accent.

The Sound

(See the article X-SAMPA for explanations of the phonetic symbols used.)

New York-New Jersey English is predominantly characterized by the following sounds and speech patterns:

• The "aw" vowel sound of words like talk, law, cross, and coffee is back and rounded, and higher than its equivalent in many other U.S. dialects. In some New York–area accents, this vowel is [O:], not unlike the corresponding vowel in Received Pronunciation; in the most extreme New York accents, it is even higher and possesses an inglide: [U@].

• There is a class of words with a historical "short a" vowel, including plan, class, and bad, where the vowel has become higher than historical [{] and developed an inglide: [e@], or, in the most extreme accents, [I@]. This class is similar to, but larger than, the class of words in which Received Pronunciation uses the so-called broad A.

• The traditional New York–area accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the phoneme \\r`\\ does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no \\r`\\ in words like park [pA:k], butter [bV4@], or here [hi@]. This feature is somewhat less widespread than the two above; there are plenty of New Yorkers who have fully rhotic English

• In the most old-fashioned and extreme New York–area accents, the vowel sounds of words like girl and of words like oil both become a diphthong [VI]. This is often misperceived by speakers of other accents as a "reversal" of the "er" and "oy" sounds, so that girl is pronounced "goil" and oil is pronounced "erl"; this leads to the caricature of New Yorkers saying things like "Joizey" and "terlet". (This particular speech pattern is no longer very prevalent; the character Archie Bunker was a good example of a speaker who had this feature.)

• Some speakers replace the dental fricatives [T] and [D] with dentalized stops, so that words like thing and this sound similar to "ting" and "dis". This feature is also becoming less and less frequent.

Related Topics

• Regional Vocabularies of American English

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