Why do we have all these regional variations? Why do people in Boston and
New York call white coffee "regular" when everywhere else regular coffee is
black? Why do people in Texas say "arn" for iron? Why do so many people in
New York say "doo-awg" for dog, "oo-awf" for off, "kee-ab" for cab,"thoid" for
third, "erster" for oyster? There is certainly no shortage of theories, some of
which may be charitably described as being less than half-baked. Charlton Laird,
generally a shrewd and reliable observer of the vagaries of English, writes in The
Miracle of Language: "The New York City variant of doy for die, boy for buy,
thoid for third suggests forms in Yorkshire, which are reflections of the strong
influence of old York upon the New York." That is just nonsense; people in
Yorkshire simply do not speak that way and never have. Robert Hendrickson in American Talk cites the interesting theory, which he attributes to a former
professor of Hofstra University, that the New York accent may come from
Gaelic. The hallmark of the New York accent is of course the "oi" diphthong as
in thoidy-thoid for thirty-third and moider for murder, and Hendrickson points
out that oi appears in many Gaelic words, such as taoiseach (the Irish term for
prime minister). However, there are one or two considerations that suggest this
theory may need further work. First, oi is not pronounced "oy" in Gaelic;
taoiseach is pronounced "tea-sack."
Second, there is no tradition of converting "ir" sounds to "oi" ones in Ireland,
such as would result in murder becoming moider. And third, most of the Irish
immigrants to New York didn't speak Gaelic anyway.
But there are other factors at work, such as history and geography. The colonists
along the eastern seaboard naturally had closer relationships with England than
those colonists who moved inland.
That explains at least partly why the English of the eastern seaboard tends to
have so much in common with British English—the tendency to put a "yew"
sound into words like stew and Tuesday, the tendency to have broader and
rounder "a" and "o" sounds, the tendency to suppress "r" sounds in words like
car and horse. There are also similarities of vocabulary. Queer is still widely
used in the South in the sense of strange or odd. Common still has a pejorative
flavor (as in "She's so common") that it lacks elsewhere in America.
Ladybugs, as they are known in the North, are still called ladybirds in the South
and sidewalks in some areas are called pavements, as they are in Britain. All of
these are a result of the closer links between such East Coast cities as Boston,
Savannah, and Charleston and Britain.
Fashion comes into it too. When the custom arose in eighteenth-century Britain
of pronouncing words like bath and path with a broad a rather than a flat one, the
practice was imitated along the eastern seaboard, but not further inland, where
people were clearly less susceptible to considerations of what fashionable
society thought of them. In Boston, the new fashion was embraced to such an
extent that up to the middle of the last century, according to H.L. Mencken,
people used the broad a in such improbable words as apple, hammer, practical,
and Saturday.Related to all these factors is probably the most important, and certainly the least
understood, factor of all, social bonding, as revealed in a study by William
Labov of the University of Pennsylvania, probably America's leading
dialectologist. Labov studied the accents of New York City and found that they
were more complicated and diverse than was generally assumed. In particular he
studied the sound of r's in words like more, store, and car. As recently as the
1930s such r's were never voiced by native New Yorkers, but over the years they
have come increasingly to be spoken—but only sometimes. Whether or not
people voiced the r in a given instance was thought to be largely random. But
Labov found that there was actually much more of a pattern to it. In a word,
people were using r's as a way of signaling their social standing, rather like the
flickerings of fireflies. The higher one's social standing, the more often the r's
were flickered, so to speak. Upper middle-class speakers pronounced the r about
zo percent of the time in casual speech, about 30 percent of the time in careful
speech, and 60 percent of the time in highly careful speech (when asked to read a
list of words). The comparable figures for lower-class speakers were 10 percent
for the first two and 30 percent for the third. More than that, Labov found, most
people used or disregarded r's as social circumstances demanded. He found that
sales assistants in department stores tended to use many more r's when
addressed by middle-class people than when speaking to lower-class customers.
In short, there was very little randomness involved.
Even more interestingly, Labov found that certain vowel sounds were more
specific to one ethnic group or another. For instance, the tendency to turn bag
into something more like "be-agg" and bad into "be-add" was more frequent
among second-generation Italians, while the tendency—and I should stress that
it was no more than that—among lower-class Jewish speakers was to drawl
certain "o" sounds, turning dog into "doo-awg," coffee into "coo-awfee." The
suggestion is that this is a kind of hypercorrection. The speakers are
unconsciously trying to distance themselves from their parents' foreign accents.
Yiddish speakers tended to have trouble with certain unfamiliar English vowel
sounds. They tended to turn cup of coffee into "cop of coffee." The presumption
is that their children compensated for this by overpronouncing those vowels.
Hence the accent.
So while certain distinctive pronunciations like "doo-er" (or "doo-ah") for door,
"oo-off" for off, "kee-ab" for cab, "moider" for murder, and so on are all features of the New York accent, almost no native New Yorker uses more than a few of
them.
Outside New York, regional accents play an important part in binding people
together—sometimes in unexpected ways. On Martha's Vineyard the "ou" sound
of house and loud was traditionally pronounced "haus – and "laoud." With the
rise of tourism, the normal, sharper American "house" pronunciation was
introduced to the island and for a while threatened to drive out the old sound.
But a study reported by Professor Peter Trudgill in Sociolinguistics
found that the old pronunciation was on the increase, particularly among people
who had left the island to work and later come back. They were using the old
accent as a way of distinguishing themselves from off-islanders.