[LINK] "The Slow Demise of the New York Accent"

[rfmcdonald]

Joe. My. God reports that, according to the New York Post, the distinctive New York City accent we all know and love is disappearing as populations shift and the accent falls out of favour.

"In Manhattan [the accent] is definitely dying," Jochnowitz says. Manhattan has also seen the most influx of new people from outside the state, who don't usually pick up an accent. The dialect "remains mostly in the outer boroughs, and is most alive in Staten Island." Staten Island is a known stronghold of New York talk not only because it has the most stable New York population, but because "anywhere you have lots of white people — Jews and Italians and Irish and Germans — whose origins are in the city, you're going to find that accent pretty systematically," Newman says. Its relative isolation may have also helped.

As the accent is dying in some places, it's migrated to others. New Yorkers have brought their accents with them to Long Island — also known as Lawn Guyland — or New Joisey (hello, cast of "Jersey Shore"!) No one asks to meet you on the corner of "Thoity Thoid and Thoid Street" anymore, or declares that "the oily boid gets the woim" — that particular feature has been gone for "50, 60, 70 years," Jochnowitz says. It was "laughed out of the dialect" — stigmatized so much that people were shamed into cutting it out. The same thing is happening now to the "yuhs guys" and "sawr it." "If people try to lose [their accent], they're more likely to lose it if they feel they're not going to get ahead in life with it," Jochnowitz adds, although he mentioned that a good number of educated people hang on to their accents, though sometimes a bit self-consciously. Ed Koch, himself an unrepetent R-dropper, once went so far as to say he wouldn't mourn Brooklynese if it disappeared.