Daily Dose of English 131
The New York Accent
Daily Dose of English 131
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more at benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the New York accent, or well, the general New York accent, which is why I went back to the word more and said a little more New Yorker, more, because we're going to talk about that today. And I think it's kind of fun. So the New York accent actually is, there's a bunch of different ones in that area. There's so many people that there's actually a lot of different accents that you can find from all sorts of different parts of New York. If you've never been to New York or haven't really learned about it that much, there are five boroughs, which are different like sections of the city that feel really quite different. Each of them have very different feelings and economies and number of people, and they end up having really quite different accents. And New York is one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, and so there are a ton of people that are maybe native English speakers, but with a ton of influence from like every language in the world, basically. And, and, and there are lots of different, uh, I guess like sub cultures in New York that had been around for decades, maybe even like a hundred years, right? Like we talked about Italian food the other day and like Italian Americans, um, like there's plenty of them. And a lot of them are from New York and that area. and there's quite a specific accent to even various different parts, not even just New York City. And so I'm only gonna talk kind of generally about what you might hear of like the New York accent, like the New York metropolitan accent that is pretty recognizable, but there are many others in there. So if you go to New York and you hear other accents, like that's probably why. It's quite similar to a lot of the kind of more New England accents in a lot of ways, but there's plenty of things that make it a little bit different. And yeah, I really quickly wanna go back to the boroughs thing, which are, borough is not a super common word for like a place, but we use it in New York for some reason. And the five boroughs are Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Yeah, those are the five. And those are the different parts of the actual city itself. There is New York State as well, like there's upstate New York and there's also Long Island. Long Island actually sounds pretty similar to this accent. And if you look at New York on a map, you can see there's sort of the three parts. There's the island that is Long, that is Long Island. Then there's like the part that everybody have seen before, like that's the city. Usually we think of Manhattan, that's the most famous borough. and then everything above it, so upstate, is upstate New York. So, anyways, with that, let's get into the accent, which is mostly heard in like parts of Brooklyn, Queens, it's really heard everywhere, but I think primarily it's like people from sort of the more north in Manhattan, I think Staten Island, and other parts of just New York in general. But let's get into the vowels, because as we've talked about before, the vowel sounds, the ow, aw, ee, those are the things that really change in, especially in English accents or English dialects. A lot of other things are the same, right? There's not a huge change in how they say their t's or their p's or whatever, but there's tons of changes in vowels. So I'm actually following a list on Wikipedia. There's a fantastic article about, actually there's a lot of really good articles about various English accents that have really good charts if you can read IPA. And I'm gonna be going through that right now. So the first thing that we look at is the ah sound in my accent, ah. And so you can hear it just like that in New York or act, pal. But then also you can hear a little bit of a different version, act or bath and mad or pass, kind of an ah sound. That's a good one, er, pass. Aw ends up being very similar, right? Father, father. Maybe it's a little fronted, father. But again, it's pretty much the same. Then we get to the sort of the more closed sounds, aw, aw, like in bother and lot. Like that's pretty much the same as my accent. But then there's a sound that I don't even have in my dialect, which is aw, or aw, or something like that. and they might say it in bought, saw, dog, loss, and that's just a really good sound there. It sort of starts tight and closed and it almost like relaxes, aw, dog. Can I pet your dog? Can I pet your dog? Then we get into eh, very much the same, right? Dress, met, not a huge change. Now there is with the schwa sound, the uh, right? About, arena, same sounds. Ih can kind of change a little bit, just like a little bit of, like a little bit higher or something, hit or hit, but it's really similar. Skim. E as well, it can become, A, A, which has like, it starts a bit lower, then it goes E, so like BAME, FLATE, but that's not super common, and it's very subtle, so you're probably not gonna notice it. A sound like in bus and flood, also the same. U like in book and put, also the same, and OO is very similar, just like I do it, but you might hear it as OO sometimes, and like an actual true NOO, but that's, Not that common. You're going to mostly hear ooh, ooh, food, glue, or things like that. That's just the same as my accent. I'd actually recommend that nobody ever say pure ooh in English. Like in food, it just sounds really strange. It's always this ooh sound, but yeah. Then we get into the diphthongs, which are a little bit different, but they're mostly the same, right? There might be a little bit of lowering in like ride and bright or things like that. Now is very much the same. Like and paid is going to be the same. Oy and choice and boy, moist, same sounds pretty much as my accent. Same thing with O is like goat. They might have it a little bit lower, an O, O, O, O, or sorry, a little bit more closed rather, O, goat, and show, but I don't think that's really gonna be noticed or anything like that. but the core is in the R's, because a lot of New York accents are non-rhotic, which means that they don't have the R sound in most of their words. And so instead of saying barn or car, you're gonna hear bon and ca, or ca, ca, there we go, it goes up, ca, bon, ca, and pock. Ah, right? So like in some like Australian accent and some British accents, right, there's not really a change. Like you hear caw, caw, or pock. There's like no change in that vowel. It's just a long ah. But in the New York accent, it does like go upwards. So caw, caw, bon, on, bon, bon. Uh, so Park, the car and the bond you might hear. Um, if you go, if you hear, we might talk about the Boston accident, some pipe at some point, but that's where you might hear pack the car and the bond that again, doesn't have as the same like ER sound. And it also doesn't really change, but this is a little bit lower and almost, um, I think of it as like starting low and then relaxing bond car and park. Um, I wonder what the subtitles are going to be in this. That's going to be interesting to see. The next R sound we have is ear, which becomes really similar, ear, fear, peer, and tear. Same thing with air, becomes bear, there, put it there. So the phrase that I like to use for this is, Here there are no cars, here there are no cars, right? Here there are no cars becomes here there are no cars, cars, here there are no cars. Sorry, gotta work on that. And so what you might notice that car suddenly sounds a bit like cuz, like because, cause and because. Which does happen, right? Because we can have what are called homonyms. No, that's wrong. Homophones, that's the word. Homo is like the root for same and phone is the root for sound. So homophones are the words that sound the same but are written differently or mean different things or whatever. We get the same R sound in like burn, doctor, doctor, horse, score, tour. We also get a U in like cure, Europe, pure. And so we get this almost, I almost think of like New York accent sounding a bit like harsher, like when you start the sounds, like they feel like they jump out at you almost. Um, which I think is really cool. I really like the New York accent, New York accent. Um, I'm not very good at it, but I think it's cool. Um, there is this cot-cot distinction, which is something you might've heard of before, but that's that thing that I mentioned earlier of the difference between aw in dog and an ah in bother. Bother, dog, or awl, bought, things like that. Because I would say them the same. Bother, dog, awl, all the same vowel. Um, there's also a thing in what's called a short a split system, which there are slightly different ass sounds, um, or, or, uh, sounds depending on like what the word is. And it's a thing that you just sort of learn. Um, and so if I look at this chart, we see like words like fan, fan and lamb are like that, but then animal, planet in Spanish have this ah sound. Um, same with Frank, Frank. Bag can have bag, um, dragon can have ah. And then we get words like grab, grab, instead of grab, grab, has this sort of like fan, grab. Same with ask, or bath, or happy, or I know happy, sorry, is ah, happy. And so there's this split between those words, right? Some of them are pronounced like ah, and some of them are pronounced like ah. In my dialect, I say only the ones that are before muh and nuh as eh, always. Spanish, animal, fan, lamb, all that, and everything else is ah. But my mom, for example, she says Spanish, and I don't know why. She's from the same part of the country as I am. I've met people that say Spanish and animal. There are these splits that happen. and it's not consistent. It's really cool, but it's a great example of why English, not English, languages just cannot be memorized like that because these splits are completely arbitrary. Anyways, I see that I've run over time. It is, we're 12 and a half minutes into this. So I thank you very much for listening to this episode of Ben's, of a daily dose of English. And I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something. Let me know down in the comments what accent you want to hear about next, but that's all for me. I'll see you again. Bye. Have a good one.
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