Yooj New York accents keep some candidates all too yooman
Good or bad, Trump and Sanders’ ways of speaking stick with them
If you’ve been distracted by the verbal styles of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, it’s probably because you don’t understand New York, the city where both were born.
“We’re real, no niceties,” says Jake Dell, owner of the famous Katz’s Deli in Manhattan. “There’s no ‘bless your heart,’ ” he says. “We prefer ‘eff you.’ ” Except he didn’t say “eff.”
Dell, whose deli is on East Houston Street — and that’s Houston with a “house” in it — and is not related to the eponymous Montrose deli, says the distinctive New York accent is the product of “years of generational training.”
Sanders, Dell says, sounds like his grandfather, “hardcore Brooklyn,” while Trump, who is from Queens, speaks with a moneyed edge.
That’s a pretty accurate assessment, says William Labov, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied New York speech.
“They’re both New Yorkers,” he says, “but Trump went to private schools and a military academy. He’s a member of the upper class, and that’s the way he relates to the New York dialect.”
Sanders is different. “Sanders went to public schools, and he was part of the upwardly mobile middle class.”
One of the muchparodied speech elements common to both presidential candidates is the dropping of the initial h in words such as “huge” and “human,” which come out as “yooj” and “yooman.”
“It’s one of the special features of New York English,” says Jennifer Nycz, an assistant professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.
One place where they differ significantly, she says, is in pronouncing the r’s in words such as “fear” and “future.” Sanders’ come out as “feah,” a pattern that Nycz says is termed “non-rhotic.”
Labov has monitored this particular feature, and he says Trump pronounces about 95 percent of those r’s while Sanders says only about 20 percent. “Trump avoids the extreme patterns for New York,” he says.
Across the country, including the South, those lost r’s are being pronounced far more than in the past. The change is slow in New York and Boston but fast everywhere else.
Before the 1930s, Labov says, non-rhotic speech was common in the upper class — think Franklin Roosevelt — because the rich were imitating the British, but that tumbled rapidly.
Another place to look, Nycz and Labov say, is the so-called “cot/caught” pairing. About half the country pronounces each of the pair differently, and half say them the same way. (The trend line points to sameness.) Classic New Yorkers say them differently, with the hardcore, Nycz says, adding a little mustard, so “caught” comes out not just as “kawt” but as “kwawt.” That’s dying, though.
Both Sanders and Trump, and all politicians, walk a thin line. They must, Labov says, retain enough of their birth accent to seem down-toearth but elevate it enough to seem as if they are capable of taking on complex problems. (For Trump, Nycz says, the accent helps him seem “straightforward and tough.”)
“Most have retained their earlier speech patterns, but they are torn between two goals,” Labov says. Both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy managed to work within that framework
and, he says, Bill Clinton was well balanced.
Southern and New York accents tend to be seen in surveys as “the worst type of American English,” Nycz says.
In any case, both men have to fight the perception of being New York speakers across the country. “People see New York speech as belonging
to either comedians or gangsters,” Labov says.
Though Sanders has lived in Vermont for decades and Trump travels all over, it’s not surprising that they haven’t dropped their accents. Ways of speaking, Labov says, tend to firm up in high school.
Nycz, who is from New Jersey, sometimes finds herself using her best
Jersey. When something is big, she says it’s huge. When it’s really big, “it’s yooj.”
Without making a political judgment, Labov can tell one thing from Sanders’ and Trump’s speech: “Put very simply, Sanders is more of a New Yorker than Trump.”