NY accents

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Listen to the accent of Eddie Egan in this old commercial. Eddie Egan for Miller LIte 1979 TV commercial - YouTube Egan’s accent is what I think of as the “oldtime” NY accent. My guess is that it is more associated with Irish in NY whereas the accent that we nowadays think of as typical NY is more Italian & jewish influenced.

Egan’s partner Sonny Grosso has more of what we today think of as a typical NY accent. Egan and Grosso were contemporaries but different accents. Sonny Grosso- Frankie Got Run Over By A Caddy - YouTube

Egan’s accent is like James Dunn’s James Dunn in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (3 Scenes) - YouTube

Does this accent still exist? Anyone ever hear it live? recently? I visited NY last year for a couple days but I was in Manhattan all the time and, actually, most of the people I encountered weren’t locals.

2

There’s not one NY accent. I’m from NY, and that actually sounds more like a New Jersey accent to me, but I grew up around Jews and blacks mostly, until we moved to Queens, where there were more Irish, but mostly at least third generation, and a Queens accent is different from a Manhattan accent. Anyway, you could sound different from the people on the next block in NYC.

But yes, that does sound like an Irish-influenced accent. You have Irish-influenced, Yiddish-influenced, Italian-influenced, British-influenced, even southern-influenced. There’s a whole cohort of people who came to NYC after Katrina who speak a New Orleans-New York hybrid, and then, the Black accent is very southern-influenced (I took a class in college on African American autobiography-- we spent a couple of lectures just on AA dialects), plus, I’ve heard it. I lived in a mixed neighborhood called Morningside Heights until I was 8. That’s just in Manhattan. A Brooklyn (say, Flatbush) Jew sounds different from a Manhattan (say, Lower East Side) Jew.

Where can you still hear that accent? It is fading, I expect, because few people from Ireland move to NYC anymore to freshen it, so it may die out, just like the first generation Yiddish accent is gone. There is no one who solely speaks Yiddish as a first language anymore, except maybe a tiny community in Israel of Lubavitch stuck in the 19th century. But new accents come in, because NYC remains a port city. There are Israelis in NYC now, so you hear that accent, and there’s an NYC Hispanic accent that is distinct, and it has been around, I think, probably less than 100 years.

It’s nice you noticed this. We have a record of the accent. Probably someone, somewhere, could do a master’s thesis or dissertation cataloguing things like this. My mother is a dialectologist, and did her dissertation on Slavic dialects.

3

If you haven’t spent time there then I can understand that a lot of the accents sound similar. After more exposure you’ll pick up on lot of variations. Brooklyn and duh Bronx accents are actually quite different but the media has mixed them together with disregard. I know people who can narrow an accent down to a block in Brooklyn. Those are just commonly recognized accents, every sub-culture marries another language to the growing puzzle. I can’t imagine any location in history has ever brought together so many different people from around the woild.

4

London has been quite impressive on that count, and when you consider how much smaller London is, it’s really, really impressive. London absorbed Jews from the pogroms, the East End has a Chinatown going back at least to people escaping the Opium Wars; during WWII, men from E. Europe joined the RAF to fight the Nazis, and many of them ended up staying in England; and now it has lots of people from India.

And it has as many accents as NYC. Plus, like NYC, with all it’s US accents that come from all over, London has lots of transplants from all over Britain.

5

You guys have answered a question I didn’t know how to phrase, about people in Daredevil having very different accents to identify the group - other stories set in NYC, I can’t really hear much of a group difference (from character to character, yes, sometimes, but not so much by group). The accents in that specific series may be good or may be bad but at least now they make sense (some of the Irishmen sound like they should be in an ad involving leprechauns).

6

Don’t get Daredevil confused with reality. :slight_smile: Charlie Cox is from London and does a good job but slips on occasion. I don’t remember many of the Irish having Irish accents except Finn who came in from Ireland when his brother was killed. He was played by a Scotsman.

It doesn’t sound anything like a New Jersey accent. The only people in New Jersey who sound like that live very close to the city and it is just bleed over. James Gandolphini needed a dialect coach to sound like Tony Soprano who lived in Bergen County. Gandolphini grew up in Bergen County.

7

To my ears Egan sounds more Manhattan and Grasso sounds more Brooklyn/Staten Island. I have no idea where they grew up.

8

Oh, I know the accents in English media tend to be about as real as… well, as they often are in Spanish media (even when actor and character are from the same place). But at least it is a case where it can make sense to have different accents as a group characterization device for people who are supposed to all live within spitting distance of each other.

9

New Orleans has quite a few highly distinct dialects, depending on which part of the city you’re from, but the downtown dialect is strikingly similar to the Greater New York dialect (typically referred to as the “Brooklyn” accent, though it spans more than just Brooklyn). I had classmates from those neighborhoods who probably could have passed for Lower East Side if you primed them with a few names/references.

10

What about Bugs Bunny’s accent, esp in the earlier cartoons? Mel Blanc said Bugs’ accent was a cross between Brooklyn and Bronx. Are there people who speak like Bugs today? He notably says oi for or such as ‘boid’ for bird. Is the pronunciation still around?

11

My mother, who is 85 and Bronx Irish, pronounces “oil burner” as “erl boinuh.” :slight_smile:

12

I had some older relatives retaining accents, but I think they’re all gone now. The accents remain, but the proliferation of accents in N’Yawk and exposure to the rest uh duh woild outside uh Joysey has tempered duh way day tawk.

13

I’ve nothing to add other than I’ve got my kids (UK, 8 and 10) saying

“Get me a cwoffeee…Ahm walkin’ here!” in very, very strong fake, generic Noo Yoik accents.

It amuses me.

14

You can respond with a mock Philadelphia accent,

“Therr arr no morr coffee cayuns. We’ll get morr tamara. Yo, could youse guys show some grateetood and get me a tal to clean up this wooderr?”

15

New Jersey accents are really a continuum. The real strong NYC-like accents are only really common in Newark, Elizabeth, and Jersey City. As you go south, the accents slowly bleed into Philadelphia accents, which can sound a li’l soffer to Caleefornyuh ears :slight_smile: Some areas of coastal southeastern NJ, such as Cape May, have a slight “hoi toider” influence.

16

I was seeing a woman from South Jersey near Philly who has a seriously strong Philly accent. It was very cute coming from her but when she was trying to sound sexy it sounded ridiculous.

17

My grandmother died at 104 and other than being a baby in Italy she spent her life on Staten Island. Boil was bearl. Oil was earl. My brother went to Rutgers and it was Rutchers.

18

When I was in Northern Ireland last spring, I was surprised at how much Ulster sounded like the traditional Noo Yawk accent.

19

Another one similar to Egan in the OP is Archie of Duffy’s tavern… “where the elite meet to eat”

20

My wife is a Manhattan native and does have an accent – nothing like a Boroughs honk, but there are certain pronounciations and terms she uses that are (to me) “Manhattanese.” If anything, she at times sounds a bit German/Yiddish to me (her mother was an Austrian Jew who spoke German and Yiddish at home).

Her brother, who is almost a decade older that the Shark Wife, has a heavier accent (but not real Boroughs stuff; his wife is Straight-Outta-Queens: she has the stereotype accent). His kids, 22 and 16, effectively have no indentifying accents. I’ve read that some linguists attribute the growing “anchorperson” voice to media saturation, where the desirable – or at least modeled – accent is a homogenized one.*

I also like the upthread idea that NY culture is far less “Irish” than it was during the great migrations which, in turn, affects the sustainability of “brogueish” NY-ese.

*YMMV and warranty coverage my vary. This is coming from a Utah/SoCal native transplanted to NY-Philly Metro Area.