What Brooklyn Accent?

The June 15, 1935 The New Yorker magazine ran the Thomas Wolfe's "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" short story. At the time the magazine cost 15 cents. I just thought that was interesting. A friend located the story on the http://log24.com/log/saved/OnlyTheDead.html website, if you want to read it. He remarked how difficult it was to read because of the 'Brooklyn dialect.' "What dialect I says? There's no dialect in Brooklyn, we speaks English." I read Wolfe's short story and had no problems understanding the words. My friend was looking at me as if I should translate Wolfe's written words. The short story wasn't written in a foreign language. It was English. I've heard over the years that people from New York, Brooklyn and The Bronx in particular, speak funny or different. I was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens, and went to schools in The City (Manhattan) and The Bronx. I never noticed a dialect the whole time. To what are people referring? Clearly people from Jersey and Boston speak with a dialect, but Brooklyn. I don't think so.

In my search for information about the Brooklyn dialect, I actually found people who believed most people from Brooklyn sound like Rosie Perez, Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie. Do you really think we all walk around saying fugedaboudit (forget about it)? Do you think we rearrange the English language when an R comes after a vowel, it is often dropped? IR becomes OI, but OI becomes IR, and TH becomes D as in "Dey sell tirlets on doity-doid street. How confusing is that?

Almost every summer we spent two weeks in the Catskills/Borscht Belt where I was exposed to Yiddish spoken by English-speaking Jews. When I got home, my friends and I ran around yelling Mazal Tov, oy or oy vey. When I came home from school I got a nosh of bagels and lox. My mother sometimes called me a klutz, which wasn't kosher ((slang) appropriate, legitimate). Klutz was better than being called a schmuck. You always wanted your friends to think you had chutzpah, but not your mother.

When I go back to Brooklyn, I seldom find people who were born in Brooklyn. There's a whole new group of people from somewhere else. Dialect is a variation of a spoken language shared by those in a particular area or a particular social or ethnic group. Geographically, dialects are the result of settlement history, like Little Italy and Chinatown in lower Manhattan. If my friends ever spoke such a dialect, they have spread it the burbs (suburbs) of Nassau County, Westchester County, Rockland, Queens, Staten Island, and Jersey (Joizey). Most have moved from Brooklyn, but still remain close enough to cruise in on the Long Island Expressway to the Grand Central and then the Belt (Belt Parkway). Some even occasionally cross the Hudson over the Verrazzano to the Belt, taking that around following the coast past Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach, stopping at Coney Island, at the original Nathan's Famous for a hot dog, fried clams and their great French fries.

I did find a website http://alt-usage-english.org/audio_archive.shtml which contains an audio archive of people with different accents reading texts. You can actually hear a New Yorker read text. The speaker is identified as a New York City speaker, recently relocated to Missouri. You can judge if his New York accent has been corrupted by Missouri.