New york accent

Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Comunicación
Escuela de Traducción e Interpretariado
Fonética Inglesa III
Prof. Rommy Anabalón

New York Accent

Constanza González Ireland
Fernanda Riquelme Calderón
Javiera Véliz Rojas
Index

1) Introduction
2) History of the New York accent
3) New York Grammar
a) Yiddish
b) Non Rhotic
c) The Lack of Inversion in Indirect Object4) New York Vocabulary
5) Pronunciation
a) Vowels
b) Consonants
6) Examples

Introduction
New York: the city of lights. It is also the most populous city in the United States. It consists of 5 boroughs: Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. It exerts a vast influence over worldwide commerce, culture, entertainment, fashion and finances. Since New York is one ofthe most influential cities in the world, and communication is what makes the world go round, its particular accent caught our attention.
The accent of a language is what defines people’s origin, or at least where they live. The New York accent, also known as “New Yorkese” or “Brooklynese” is the most distinctive one over the entire country. People in the United States can determine where someonelives depending on the accent they have. For example, if someone says “Brudda! I live in Noo Yawk”, everybody will know that he, or she, is definitely a New Yorker.
This particular accent also has its own history. It went through a lot of different situations that made it to be what it is now. And this is what it is going to be explained and exemplified.

History of the New York Accent
The NewYork accent is very diverse. People usually refer to the city as a melting pot. Why is that? What does it mean? It’s an analogy. New York acts as a big pot. In that pot, all the ingredients are cooked together, resulting on a homogenous mixture. The ingredients, of course, represent the different cultures, races and languages. The final homogenous mixture represents New York, a city that has beeninfluenced by different cultures for the last 400 years. The result: the unique New York accent.
It all started in the 1600’s; to be more exact, in the year 1614. At that time, the place which would later be named New York was occupied by the Lenape, Native Americans which were later named the Delaware Indians. It was in that year that Europeans arrived. They founded a Dutch fur trade settlement.The place was named “Nieuw Amsterdam” (New Amsterdam). A man named Peter Minuit, who was the Dutch colonial director-general, bought the island of Manhattan and Staten Island.
After that, in the year 1664, the English conquered the city. They decided to rename it, changing it from “Nieuw Amsterdam” to “New York”. The name was inspired by the English Duke of York and Albany.
In the 1880’s, TheIrish and Midwesterner immigrants arrived to New York City. The Irish Potato Famine forced thousands and thousands of Irish people to escape the rural depression from their home towns and moved to New York City. This event had a great influence on the city: the Irish were one quarter of the whole city’s population!

The Midwesterners who arrived to New York City came from a number of differentplaces. The descendants were French, German, Scandinavian and Scottish.
In addition to all those cultures and languages, Italian and Jewish immigrants arrived to New York City as well. Today, New York City has the largest Jewish community outside Israel in the entire world.
Finally, the newer New Yorkese or New York dialect has been affected by a number of communities including the Black, the Polishand Latino communities.

New York Grammar

As has been mentioned, the origins of the New York dialect are diverse because of immigration. Many people arrived to New York in the 1800s, and their contribution was to enrich New York English. The next points show the most significant New York English grammar changes.

* Yiddish

Many Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived to New York from...