05/31/2021
SAVE NEW YORK CULTURE BY SAVING THE NEW YORK DIALECT
When you tock, do you whore-ify the natives? Do you call your best friend Hairy? Then even if you live in New York, you're not a full-fledged New Yorker.
Not everything about the New York dialect is a simplification of American English. New Yorkers continue to disambiguate many words that have become homonyms in most of the USA.
If "merry Mary got married" sounds repetitive to you, and if you are a transplant in the Big Apple,
you may be unconsciously helping to kill off New York's cultural distinctiveness.
Let's not homogenize the USA by killing off our dialects. When in New York, speak like New Yorkers do! Learn the distinctive New York dialect by following the simple steps below.
1. The vowels in "merry" and "marry" should match those in "Betty" and "batty", because the
first has short E and the second has short A.
2. "Mary" is pronounced the same way all Americans pronounce it, much like a regular long A, but
differently than the vowels in #1 above.
3. In most cases, you can let the spelling guide you. Or you could imitate a native New Yorker, or
you could even listen to any other English speaker outside of North America for these distinctions.
4. Short O is not the same as AU and AW. So "caught" is not the same as "cot". To pronounce "caught" the New York way, say "court" but drop the R.
(You probably already know that many New Yorkers and British people drop their R’s when they pronounce "court", which makes "caught" and "court" homonyms for them. Before a vowel, many New Yorkers even add an R where no R is written: “Chiner and Russia” yet “Russier and China.”)
5. Being Canadian means never having to say you're "Sari". That's because they say "sorey" instead.
Now, if you're from outside of New York, then your weird pronunciation of short OR may make a New Yorker think you're Canadian. Instead, pronounce a short OR like AR (as in "bar") in the following words: historic, priority, Florida, sorry, lorry, forest, horrible, minority, tomorrow. You can reserve your ORE pronunciation for one-syllable OR-words like: for, or, more, York, force, short, etc.
6. Outside of New York, the letters AL are often pronounced like OL, so that "call" rhymes with "doll." To sound like a true New Yorker, drop the R in "choral" when you "call" your friends. There is a reason why "talk" is not spelled the same as "tock"! Use this AW sound in the following words: talk, walk, chalk, all, small, crawl, tall, fall, bald, and many others.
7. You don't have to sound like a Mafioso to speak like a true New Yorker. Franklin Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy did not! You can experience upper class New York speech by watching some old movies. Because many people in the movie business had been in Broadway show business when movies with sound were becoming popular, the New York dialect used to be the standard pronunciation for the whole country. Eventually Hollywood stars stopped dropping their R's and sounded like middle Americans. Nowadays, so many out-of-towners are invading New York that the elegant, venerable New York dialect is dying out. If you live here, it’s your duty to help New York retain its cultural distinctiveness by participating in New York's linguistic culture!
