ESCAPE FROM NOO YAWK
Hey! Youse! This is how our NY accent went from classy to trashy
The traditional New York accent, or Brooklynese — the accent of Archie Bunker, Travis Bickle and Mona Lisa Vito, Marisa Tomei’s fast-talking character in “My Cousin Vinny” — was once regarded as the height of sophistication. In the new book “You Talkin’ to Me?: The Unruly History of New York English” (Oxford University Press; out Tuesday), E.J. White writes that the language variant, which contains more vowel sounds than any language in North America, was once “a marker of upper-class speech,” to the extent that F. Scott Fitzgerald described its speakers as having “voices full of money.”
“In the days when Mrs. Astor held balls in her home on Fifth Avenue, the sound identified posh speakers,” writes White.
The accent — derived from speech patterns in 18th-century London and defined by distinguished features, such as not pronouncing our R’s (known as nonrhotic speech) — was a mark of prestige and accomplishment as recently as the mid-20th century.
“If you grew up in New York or New England in the 1940s, you would have learned, either in public school or in private or finishing school, a cultivated accent known as ‘General American.’ Like the New York accent, General American was non-rhotic,” White writes.
This New Yorkese was everywhere in America: spoken in movies, in plays and on the radio — the most influential and mostlistened to mass communication of the time.
The accent was so prestigious that stars, such as Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, studied it with speech coaches.
America’s shift away from New Yorkese was slow and gradual. White believes that the shift was largely driven by antiSemitism.
“In 1918, the Association of New England Deans, which included the presidents of Harvard and Yale, gathered to discuss what the Association called — not ominously at all — ‘the Jewish problem,’ ” she writes.
Their “problem” was that the percentage of Jewish students at these schools was growing quickly.
“The president of Harvard, Lawrence Lowell, argued that something had to be done about this — that if too many Jewish students enrolled at a given school, upperclass Protestants would send their sons elsewhere,” White writes.
To combat this, the Ivy League developed a gatekeeping system that is not only still in use today, but is also what White calls “the most recognizable feature of modern college admissions.”
“Starting with Harvard, in 1922, colleges began to ask applicants to fill out forms that included questions on ‘Race and
Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother’ and ‘Birthplace of Father,’ ” she writes. “They asked for letters of reference from teachers and headmasters to attest to the applicant’s ‘aptitude and character.’ Was the student an athlete? Was he leadership material? Was he agreeable? In short, they found ways of determining elements of an applicant’s background that allowed them to enforce de facto ethnic quotas.”
As part of this effort, these schools also greatly expanded their recruitment into the West and South, and away from the Northeast, in an effort to decrease the percentage of Jewish students at their schools.
Elite institutions in general followed suit, and the result was a decades-long decline in popularity for the New York accent, as the sound of the Midwest became a new marker of the elite.
“Within a few decades, newscasters, college graduates, and actors in film and television largely adhered to a rhotic standard — a standard that signified Americanness
in large part by distinguishing itself from the speech of America’s capital of immigration,” White writes. “Americans sound the way they do because New Yorkers sound the way they do.”
The decline in prestige of the New York accent was reflected throughout pop culture, as it became a sign of bumbling, outof-touch comic relief.
At first, though, the accent also signified a crude form of cleverness. In the 1930s, Groucho Marx, who sounded very much like the New Yorker he was, became one of America’s top comedians by playing characters who were “not just comic and quick-witted, but pointedly lower class and pointedly ethnic.”
The following decade, Bugs Bunny, a cartoon character modeled in part after Marx, became a national treasure with similar sounds and attributes.
White writes that the animators wanted Bugs to be a “tough little stinker.” To facilitate this, Mel Blanc, who voiced the character, made him a New Yorker.
“They wanted a tough little character,” Blanc once said. “So, I thought maybe either someone who came from Brooklyn or The Bronx, which was the toughest-talking area in the world. And I thought, ‘Why don’t I put them both together?’ ”
In subsequent years, though, the quick wit associated with the sound became deprioritized, as tough-talking New Yorkese characters often became either brutal, dumb, lower-class or simple comic relief.
Case in point: Archie Bunker, who was a 1970s symbol of bigotry and ignorance. On “Law & Order,” “any character not wearing a suit is likely to have a Noo Yawk accent,” White quotes linguistics author Thomas Bonfiglio.
Even stories set in mystical or fictional worlds make use of this. “Guardians of the Galaxy” uses brash-talking Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) as its comic relief, and “Aladdin” employs the same strategy for Gilbert Gottfried’s Iago.
“Star Wars” was even set for this initially, White writes, early script drafts called for C-3PO to have “the cadences of a Bronx used-car dealer.” It was only after British actor Anthony Daniels read for the role that George Lucas converted the droid into an English-butler type.
The long-term result of all this is that today, the New York accent is the secondmost-widely disliked in the country, according to polls, behind only the sound of the American South.
It is also the only accent from such a prominent city that is shunned by its own speakers.
“New York City is an anomaly among world-class cities,” White writes. “Normally, the variant that a nation takes as its standard language comes from its center of finance and culture. But in the United States, the national standard accent comes from the Midwest and the West. Rarely do speakers from a world-class city respond to their own speech with such suspicion.”