E.J. White - You Talkin to Me?

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: White, E. J. (Elyse J.), author.

Title: You talkin to me? : the unruly history of New York English / E. J. White.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2020. |

Series: The dialects of North America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019039334 (print) | LCCN 2019039335 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190657215 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190657239 (epub) |

ISBN 9780190657222 (updf)

Subjects: LCSH: English languageSpoken EnglishNew York (State)

New York. | English languageDialectsNew York (State)New York. |

English languageNew York (State)New YorkPronunciation. |

English languageNew York (State)New YorkSlang. | English language

Social aspectsNew York (State)New York. | Americanisms

New York (State)New York.

Classification: LCC PE3101.N7 W45 2020 (print) | LCC PE3101.N7 (ebook) |

DDC 427/.9747dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039334

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039335

How to talk. America: Meiguo,

second tone and third.

The beautiful country.

Adrienne Suat
the Nuyorican Poets Caf

This book sometimes uses International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols to indicate specific sounds.

For an up-to-date guide to IPA symbols, the reader should consult the website of the International Phonetic Association: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org.

To listen to the sounds that IPA symbols represent on an audio player, the reader can access this website belonging to the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles: https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/keating/IPA/inter_chart_2018/IPA_2018.html.

The symbols that appear most often in this book are:

mid central vowel or schwa: the uh sound in what.

open back unrounded vowel: the sound you make when a doctor puts a tongue depressor in your mouth and tells you to say aah.

near-open front unrounded vowel: the sound you make when someone sneaks up on you.

open-mid back rounded vowel: the sound you make when you see a kitten.

eclose-mid front unrounded vowel: the sound The Fonz makes.

near-close near-front unrounded vowel: the vowel in it.

iclose front unrounded vowel: the sound you make when you say the fifth letter of the alphabet.

near-close near-back rounded vowel: the sound a ghost makes.

voiceless dental fricative: the sound at the beginning of thing.

voiced dental fricative: the sound at the beginning of that.

dvoiced dental/alveolar plosive: the sound at the beginning of duh.

fvoiceless labiodental fricative: the sound at the beginning of fuck.

It was in New York that I learned to tell people to fuck off, and I think Im a better person for it. From what I have seen, New Yorkers are connoisseurs of the word fuck. They use it as an obscenity, as an insult, as a qualifier, as a term of respect, as an adverb, as an interjection, as a method of asserting personal space, or simply as punctuation. They create new words based on it: according to data from Twitter, it was New Yorkers who created, or at least helped to popularize, one of 2014s trendiest new words, fuckboy. Another friend, also a New Yorker, argues that the words very flexibility in local usage has dulled its capacity to offend: he cant insult people, or even get the attention of people he wants to insult, by shouting fuck or calling them fuckers. This has forced him to search out alternative forms of provocation. (Hes had some success with political languagewith success defined as whether someone takes a swing at him.)

I grew up mostly on the West Coast, with my family moving from small coastal town to small coastal town. The first time I ever heard a New York accent in real life, I was eighteen years old, stepping off the plane in Newark Airport on my way to college. Im ashamed to admit this, but I was astonished: as a woman walked past shouting something in Brooklynese, I suddenly realized that I had not known New York accents were real. I had thought they were made up for television. Thats how green I was, and if the spread of internet usein particular, online videos, which allow us to see and hear ordinary strangers living far awayhas made such raw ignorance less probable, my simplicity at least gave my iteration of the coming-to-Oz scene, which Dorothies from around the world replay hourly at Newark, JFK, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, an additional element of magic. At that moment, the world seemed full of possibility. Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (although, since the crowds are fearsome, keep to the right as you move through the door and lead with your shoulder).

Learning how to move through a big city has entailed learning new expectations, new fashions, and new forms of courtesy: how to ignore a celebrity; how to walk defensively; how to watch a traffic light for the first sign of change (the red light turns off; by the time, a New York hour later, the green light turns on, you should already be crossing the street); how to know, upon a strangers unwanted approach, whether to offer help, to look sad and say, Sorry, sir, or to say, Fuck off. Because I teach the history of language, I took special interest in exploring the citys linguistic ecosystem: the slang, the place names, the conversational styles, the code-switching strategies in multilingual communities. New York Citys eight million inhabitants speak, in aggregate, some 800 languages. The citys most famous local variant of Englishwhat I just referred to as Brooklynesehas more vowel sounds than any other language in North America (variant is now the preferred term for dialect). And, as I knew when I first arrived, that variant has a rich history in film and television. Brooklynese, or New York City English, is the variant of Travis Bickle, Nathan Detroit, Archie Bunker, Detective Bobby Goren (but only when he wants the suspect to think hes an asshole), Vinny Gambini, and Mona Lisa Vito. It is also the variant of the physicist Richard Feynman; the comedian Rodney Dangerfield; the actors Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, and Fran Drescher; and many ordinary New Yorkers besides.